Level 9 Computing

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Level 9 was a British computer adventure game company who produced some of the most advanced games of the 1980s. Founded in 1981 by Michael, Nicholas and Pete Austin, the company produced about 20 games for BBC Micro, Nascom, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Oric, Atari, Lynx 48k, RML 380Z, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Apple II, and Enterprise until the commercial declining market of the text adventure genre forced their closure in June 1991.

Level 9's first program was an extension to Nascom BASIC called "Extension Basic". The first game, also for the Nascom, was called "Fantasy" and was similar to Valhalla, but with no graphics. Other products from that era was "Missile Defence", "Bomber" and "Space Invasion" - all for the Nascom. The tapes were duplicated and sent out by mail order by the brothers based on orders generated by the classified advertisements they ran in the Computing Today magazine.

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A-code

Level 9 devised their own interpretation language, A-code, around 1979. It was very memory efficient, mainly due to the advanced text compression routines which could compress texts to about 50%. The game data, which were identical for all platforms, were incorporated into the executable file for specific machines, together with the interpreter part.

A-code underwent a couple of revisions: there are three distinct versions in all, plus a couple of extensions which form new A-code versions of their own.

The first game to use this system was Colossal Adventure, a faithful conversion of "Adventure" by Will Crowther and Don Woods, yet with an added 70 extra locations to the end game.

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