Seeking guidance on contacting classic adventure developers (Level 9 / similar)

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Hi all,

I’m interested in the history and preservation of classic text/graphic adventure systems, especially Level 9 and similar UK developers from the 1980s.

I realise that private contact details shouldn’t be shared, and I’m not asking for those. What I’m hoping to find out is:

  • Are any of the original developers (e.g., Mike Austin, Nick Austin, Pete Austin) active in this community under their own names or handles?

  • Does anyone know of a public, developer-approved channel (GitHub, forum handle, mailing list, etc.) where they’ve made themselves available for questions about Level 9 history or technology?

  • Or, alternatively, does anyone here have suggestions on the best way to respectfully reach out to such developers if they are open to contact?

My interest is purely around research, preservation and understanding the technology and history, not asking for source code, proprietary assets, or anything like that.

Thanks for any pointers or advice!

— Simon

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Have you seen the GitHub page from Mike Austin?

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A lot of developers were happy enough to chat to Mark Hardisty for his Classic Adventurer project:

So, if any developers you’re interested in took part in that then you may have similar luck contacting them. It tends to be a case of doing a bit of research and reaching out on social media or to people that know them to make an initial connection.

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Welcome to the forum. At the risk of sounding narky, it might help if you do a quick search before asking this sort of question or re-inventing the wheel, as there are several topics on the reverse engineering and documenting of A-code and news of Mike Austin making Level 9 resources public. Here’s just a few:

There are also lots of interesting links within these topics.

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Mike Austin poked his nose in on the “made public!” thread, as well.

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Thanks for the welcome, and that’s fair — I appreciate the pointers.

I’ve read through several of those threads already (particularly around the A-Code specs and the archive work Mike has made public), and they’ve been very useful from a technical and historical point of view.

My question here was slightly more about etiquette and contact, rather than re-inventing the technical discussion — i.e. whether there’s a generally accepted, developer-approved way to reach out to original developers if one has questions around history or preservation, or whether the existing public threads/resources are considered the right and final channel.

That said, I take the point about searching first, and I’ll dig back through those discussions again as they clearly contain a lot of context.

Thanks again for the links — much appreciated.

— Simon

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That’s really helpful — thanks for pointing that out.

I’m familiar with The Classic Adventurer but hadn’t fully joined the dots in terms of it being a good indicator of who may still be open to contact and discussion. Using that as a starting point for research and indirect connections makes a lot of sense.

I’ll take a closer look at who participated there and treat that as guidance on both who might be receptive and how best to approach things.

Much appreciated.

— Simon

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Yes — thanks for the link. I’ve spent some time looking through the Level9-Public repository and the surrounding threads, and it’s been extremely useful from a preservation point of view.

I couldn’t see an obvious, developer-preferred way to make contact there (no contact details or guidance beyond the public repos), so I assumed that asking questions via existing issues or discussions might be the intended route — though it’s entirely possible I’ve missed something.

If there’s a specific or preferred channel associated with that repository that I should be using, I’d be very happy to be pointed in the right direction.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

— Simon

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This is only a tiny community and there are many other communities that are more likely to give you better results when searching for people from the past.

For starters, IFWiki has a people category at Category:People - IFWiki. Start by checking In memoriam. This page lists people who are known to have passed away. Thankfully, there aren’t too many people there, but that may be largely due to lack of information. At any rate, if someone is known to have passed away, then you’ll know not to look any further, as you won’t find them.

Secondly, see if there’s a page for the person you’re trying to find. It won’t have personal contact details, but it may have some leads on what happened to them after their text adventure days.

In both the above cases, IFWiki welcomes additional content on famous and not-so-famous personalities from the IF world to make it a more useful resource.

I find the 8-bit Text Adventures group on Facebook to be pretty good for tracking down people. In fact, a lot of names from the past can be found lurking there. https://www.facebook.com/groups/EightBitAdventures/