Level 9
1983-89

Level 9 were amongst the most prolific, and certainly the best known, publishers of adventure games for the Spectrum. The company specialised in adventure games for the 8-bit machines throughout its six-year existence, producing some of the best such games ever seen on the Spectrum.

The brains behind Level 9 were the Buckinghamshire-based Austin family: brothers Pete, Nicholas and Michael doing the programming, sister Margaret doing the marketing and father John managing the company. Although their games were often not especially original - Tolkein and Larry Niven were major influences - they nonetheless stood out by virtue of being well paced, large and with many tricky and often amusing puzzles. The games benefited especially from Level 9's sophisticated parser, unsurpassed until Magnetic Scrolls came on the scene in the late 1980s.

Level 9 published initially under their own name, by mail order, but later benefited from a distribution deal with Rainbird (one of the labels of British Telecom's software arm, Telecomsoft) and later with Mandarin. The company also produced a number of tie-in games with the book publishers Mosaic. The company tried but failed to make a successful transition to the increasingly dominant 16-bit market at the end of the decade and subsequently broke up.

Interviews and Articles

• On The Level (Sinclair User, May 1985)
   
• Level 9 Country (ZX Computing, September 1986)

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© Chris Owen 1994-2003