Origin Story

It was 2007. I had just moved to the UK the year before and was restarting my World of Warcraft journey on EU servers. I remember questing through Zangarmarsh — that weirdly wet, glowy mushroom zone — and noticing this same paladin kept popping up in all my quests. Every time I turned around, there he was, doing the exact same thing.

Eventually we just teamed up.
That paladin was Ian.

What followed were years of gaming together — late-night raids, theorycrafting over voice chat, and endless conversations about what our perfect game would look like. We’ve played just about everything together at some point: MMOs, shooters, RPGs, survival games, even a few truly terrible ones (for science).

At some point, without really planning it, we started making games.

Ian took a few game dev courses. I went back to school for design. But we still weren’t setting out to build a studio. We just loved the process. He was a programmer who loved games. I was an artist who loved games. And the more we collaborated, the more it made sense.

And as for the name?
We don’t remember which game started it — maybe an MMO, maybe something else — but for whatever reason, we always seemed to quit around level 8. Not on purpose. It just kept happening. Level 8 became our unofficial max level, our personal endgame. Eventually it turned into a running joke between us — “Well, made it to level 8. Guess we’ve seen it all.”

When we finally needed a studio name, there was no debate. It had to be Level 8.
It’s silly, it's an inside joke… and it means something to us.

So here we are.
Level 8 Games.

Two devs, two time zones, and one long-running in-joke that turned into something real.