7th Level

» see 7thlevel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time was the kind of object a very specific household bought in 1994: an English-language comedy CD-ROM, sold on a joke that only lands if you already know the joke. That was not my house, and it was not any house I knew. In 1994 I was ten years old and four years away from a modem, and the fastest route by which anything from an Anglo comedy troupe could have reached me did not exist yet.

7th Level was founded in Richardson, Texas in october 1993 by George Grayson, with the record producer Bob Ezrin and the musician Scott Page attached to it. The premise was reasonable for the moment: consumer PCs had just acquired CD drives and sound cards at the same time, nobody knew what to put on the discs, and comedy is cheap to license compared to building a world.

So it licensed Monty Python and made three discs out of it across 1994 to 1997, starting with Complete Waste of Time. Alongside that came Tuneland for children with Howie Mandel voicing it, Battle Beast in 1995, G-Nome in 1997, and Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, which 7th Level did not live long enough to finish. The company bought three other studios between 1995 and 1996, went from about 180 people to close to 300, and spread across several states and into Europe.

Then it stopped being a games company almost overnight. On 17 november 1997 7th Level announced a merger with Pulse Entertainment. The next day, Panasonic Interactive Media took the distribution rights to the three Monty Python titles, which ended 7th Level's involvement in publishing games at all. The Pulse merger was called off in april 1998. In february 1999 what remained merged with Street Technologies, an IT training firm, and became 7thStreet.com.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the funny part ~

The CD-ROM comedy disc is a genuinely extinct form and 7th Level made more of them than anyone. Complete Waste of Time was not a game in any structural sense. It was a desktop full of sketches, sound clips and small toys, arranged so that clicking anything produced an interruption, and it shipped with system sounds you were expected to install over your own. That was the product: the ability to make a work computer honk at a colleague.

It sold, because in 1994 a CD held more than any hard drive most people owned and the novelty of video and voice coming off a disc had not worn off. It stopped selling for exactly the same reason it started. By 1997 a modem could fetch a sound file and a browser could show a clip, and paying forty dollars for a plastic disc of jokes stopped making sense to anybody.

~ the pivot ~

The 1995 acquisitions are where the shape of the failure sits. 7th Level bought Distant Thunder Entertainment, Lanpro and PyroTechnix inside about a year and roughly doubled its headcount, on the strength of a category that had maybe two more good years in it. Three hundred people is a serious payroll for a business whose entire market was about to be replaced by a browser.

What the company had that was worth something in 1998 was not the games. It was tooling, the multimedia authoring and streaming work underneath them, which was exactly what the corporate training market wanted right then. That is the reason the pivot happened and the reason it was a real business rather than a retreat. It is also why nothing recognizably 7th Level survived it.

~ the inheritance ~

Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 was finished by Ion Storm and shipped in 1998, which is a strange sentence in both directions. The unfinished game of a dying comedy publisher became the first release of the most heavily covered studio in the industry, and it did neither of them any good.

7thStreet.com went on to become Learn2.com and then Learn.com, was bought by Taleo in 2010, and Taleo was bought by Oracle in 2012. So the corporate lineage of the company that made a Monty Python soundboard runs directly into Oracle's HR software, which is a joke the original licensor would have appreciated more than anyone at Oracle would. The Monty Python discs themselves are stranded on an operating system that no longer exists, playable now only through emulation.

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