Level 9
Level 9 was a British developer of text adventure games active between 1981 and 1991. Founded by Mike, 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, Amiga, Apple II, Memotech MTX, and Enterprise until the commercial declining market of the text adventure genre forced their closure in June 1991.
Snowball
Snowball is the first part of the Silicon Dreams trilogy. It was released during 1983, followed a year later by Return to Eden, and then by The Worm in Paradise during 1985.
The trilogy is set in a not too-distant future when humans have started colonising space. For the first two instalments the player has the role of Kim Kimberly, an undercover agent, whose goal in Snowball is to save the colonist's spacecraft from crashing into a star, and in Return to Eden to stop the defence system at the destination planet of Eden from destroying the craft. In The Worm in Paradise, the player, with the role of an unnamed citizen of Eden, must travel around the city of Enoch, learn its secrets, earn money and save the planet.
Android Snowball
The interpreter for the Level 9 A code is written and maintained by David Kinder from code originally written by Glen Summers. This has been ported to Java and to Android.
Snowball 9.
As the Snowball 9 approaches Eden, something goes wrong. A crewmember murders her shipmates, destroys the communication system and sets the ship on a collision course with the sun. The robots, being little more than automata, continue their everyday operations oblivious to the danger but the ship's computer, capable of thinking, awakens Kim Kimberley before the deranged crewmember destroys it. After exiting the modified stasis chamber Kims goal is to find a way to reach the control room and avert disaster.
Kim Kimberly.
You play Kim Kimberley, tall, athletic, intelligent with brown eyes and fair hair. Born and raised at Hampstead Crèche, which was closed when Kim was thirteen years old due to violations of the Android Protection Acts. Kim was educated at the Milton Keynes School of Life in Malta, then returned to England for National Service. Kim started doing standard security work with the occasional surveillance of subversive members of society, but ended working as a counter-espionage agent. During this time Kim accepted to travel undercover on the Snowball 9 to be there as the last resort for the worst-case scenario.
Playing the game.
The game uses a text parser for entering commands at the "What now?" prompt. The parser can interpret more than a thousand words to control movement or actions. It looks at the command, picking out two or three words it knows, ignoring the order, and tries to guess what is meant. For movement, the usual commands for moving 'NORTH', 'SOUTH', 'EAST' and 'WEST' are available (and their abbreviated forms of 'N', 'S', 'E' and 'W') as well as 'UP' and 'DOWN' ('U' and 'D' respectively) and a number of other directions and 'modes' of movement (like 'JUMP'). For actions, it understands how to pick up objects, opening doors, lighting lamps, as well as dropping objects and wielding them.
