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### LLAMASOFT - The Dromedary Years

#### (Part One)

#### Article By M. Bevan

In 1980 the then 18 year old Jeff Minter was still in unknown quantity in the fledgling world of home computer gaming. Within ten years Minter had founded his own company 'Llamasoft', unleashed a catalogue of over twenty classic 8-bit games and the term 'Minter-esque' had entered gaming lexicon to describe his highly individual, uniquely psychedelic and indeed exceptionally hairy style of game design.

The seeds of Llamasoft were sowed after Minter left secondary school to go to a sixth-form college in Basingstoke. Still unclear what he intended to study, and with his best O-level results having been in English, physics and mathematics, the hand of fate intervened in the shape of Minter's head form teacher, who suggested an extra-curricular Computer Studies course, in addition to A-levels in his strongest three subjects. Minter, whose vague knowledge of computing had previously amounted to little more than what he had read in Issac Asimov science fiction novels like 'I-Robot' and had hardly even clapped eyes on a computer terminal before, signed up. Although at first frustrated with the content and laboriously slow teaching methods of the Computer Studies course, an encounter with his brother's newly acquired home Pong machine, along with Breakout and Space Invaders at a local travelling fair stimulated the young Minter's imagination. Knowing there was suddenly potential in the computing field to interest him he did not as yet however quite make the connection between the very limited Commodore PET machine he was using at college and this brave new world of video gaming opening up around him. Jeff recalls:

'Nobody had ever really hard of programming video games back then. You had arcade games, which people knew about, Space Invaders and Asteroids, that kind of thing, and in the home things like Pong and the VCS, but the idea that someone could just sit down and create their own games was completely alien'.

Things changed when Minter one day walked into his college computer room to see something interesting. A fellow student was sat at the Commodore machine moving a crude blob around the screen by pressing the keypad. Asking how he had achieved this, the reply would change Minter's life forever. The student simply said he had 'typed it in'. Grabbing a bunch of programming manuals, Minter quickly learned PET BASIC, followed by Assembly language and began spending every lunch-time in the computer room hunched at the screen, attempting, somewhat crudely, to replicate the arcade games he had seen.

'At college we had one Commodore Pet between the whole college and I think only about four geeks in the whole place who spent their time in the computer room making these weird little games. We never thought for an instance that there would ever be a market for this stuff, it was just something we did.'

Hooked as he was, Minter was still just a hobbyist and when the time came to leave college the 'weird little games' had to be put aside when the hairy one enrolled on a full-time university course. Things did not go completely as planned however as he soon found himself struggling with his course, and hankering for the creativity he had pursued back during all those college lunch hours.

'I left college and went to university and I was very bored at university because I was on a maths and physics course, and I wasn't interested in maths and physics, I was interested in playing with computers. So in due course I got kicked out. And after I got kicked out I was supposed to be going back to a polytechnic and I spent three months there and then I got quite seriously ill. While I was ill I thought.. sod it.. I'm gonna start just making games because it just so happens that in the intervening time Uncle Clive had just brought out the ZX80 and the ZX81 and Commodore had brought over the Vic20 and so this arcane stuff which we'd been doing in college, just the four of us, suddenly opened up and I wondered whether, given that I couldn't really do anything else because I was ill, I could actually write some games and see if I could sell them.'

Thanks to his parents recent gift, a brand new Vic20, the fruits of this decision would include a conversion of the arcade/puzzle game Deflex (originally dreamt up on the that old college PET), a 'City Bomber' clone, a 'Breakout' clone, and Rox, an odd Asteroids-meets-Missile Command hybrid, all written in Commodore BASIC. Although crude looking now, Minter was becoming increasingly adept at programming and was producing titles that actually bettered some of the games doing the commercial rounds in that era. Rox, particularly was inspired by a desire to improve on a woeful third-party Asteroids clone for the ZX81 he had played and indeed, misguidedly, purchased.

'Rox, was a very simple game, but was something a bit special to me. I'd made those other few games on the Vic, and they were fine, but were all simple and all things that had been made before. Rox was something else, a little game that I made up myself, redefining the VIC characters to create a lunar surface upon which a little lander descended, and which was then beset by falling meteors. I made it look nicer than any game I'd made before, designing a custom character set so that even the text appeared in a futuristic style, and adding a proper hi-score table and everything'.

Thankfully recovering from illness, Minter set about the task of actually trying to market some of the games he had created. Previously a visit to a Sinclair hobbyist 'Micro Fair' in London had resulted in an expression of interest in some of his ZX81 games from specialist publisher DKTronics. Keen to capitalise on this interest Minter had expended much effort to produce a ZX81 version of Atari's Centipede which was unique on the machine in being able to display modified hi-res graphics instead of the Sinclair machine's standard character set. Unfortunately, when DKTronics released both Centipede and Minter's ZX81 hi-res ROM program they conveniently 'forgot' to pay him any royalties instead only handing over a derisory one-off sum. Frustrated and upset by such underhand business tactics, Minter vowed to start a proper business of his own, one which would cut out the middle-men and put him back in control of the distribution of his creations on the new Commodore machine. The genesis of the famous company name would evolve from a seemingly random event during a programming session on his beloved Vic20.

'One day I was home alone one afternoon, lying on the floor idly playing with the graphic design tool, and thinking about animals. I pushed the cursor round and drew the outline of a llama. I sat and swigged my tea, looking at the llama, and then, on a whim, directed the cursor to some empty space below the image of the beast, and wrote there, in tiny letters, the word Llamasoft!'

And thus the legendary Llamasoft was born. Minter decided it would be wise to bring in a partner to help him launch his new company, and teamed up with Richard Jones, one of the PET 'geeks' he had known at college. Jones was to run the business side of the company allowing Minter to concentrate fully on developing and creating new games. Initially distribution was to be by mail order adverts in the computer press and at computer shows rather than through high street vendors. Although he had a few titles including Rox, and a newer but fairly simple game called Headbanger's Heaven already completed for the Vic, it was obvious that better, more advanced titles needed to be created if Llamasoft were to make an impression with the games-playing public. As a diversion before starting work on designing these more demanding launch titles, Minter amused himself by revisiting his old 'City Bomber' game in a slightly misguided attempt to get his brand new company noticed in the outside world.

'City Bomber' was in the early computing community a generic title for a very basic arcade-style game in which a player controlled a plane descending over a blocky cityscape. The sole player input, a 'Bomb' button, caused a single bomb to drop from the plane and destroy a portion of the buildings below. The object of the game was to destroy the buildings so the plane could land without crashing into them on its descent. Minter took his old code for his own version, added a graphic for a waving Argentinean flag, programmed a crude version of Rule Britannia for the game's soundtrack, and called the game 'Bomb Buenos Aires!' This was 1982, the year of the Falklands conflict, and Minter had intended the game as a bit of a daft joke to parody the fervent and over-the-top resurgence of patriotism the country was experiencing. It was a plan that back-fired spectacularly and Llamasoft ended up having to apologise to the Press Complaints Commissionafter adverts for the game in computing magazines had drawn the ire of publications such as The Daily Telegraph.

Minter, sensibly, returned to creating original and non-controversial games. Inspired after seeing Eugene Jarvis' classic Defender for the first time to create a rudimentary clone, the resulting Defenda premiered at the Commodore Show in London later that year, with Minter producing several hundred copies of the game by hand in the hope of selling them to interested punters. As Jeff recalls:

'Defenda, as I called it, was a bit shit. However, back then, everything was a bit shit, and there was the possibility that Defenda might be marginally less shit than some of the other games out there. And games in machine code for the Vic were rare.'

Indeed given the call for fast, assembly language Vic games, Minter managed to shift most of his stock of Defenda at the show. The best thing to come out of the event for Llamasoft though was the interest of a representative of a US company called Human Engineered Software. HES was looking to get into the games distribution business in the States and was looking for product. Defenda fitted the bill extremely well. If Minter was able to provide HES with the game on ROM for the US market there was a great possibility of a not insignificant financial benefit for Llamasoft from the deal. Although now wary of third-party distributors, Minter was keen to follow through. Unfortunately the relationship with business-partner Jones had gone into decline. As the so called business 'guru' of the company Jones was proposing that profits should be split 70/30 in his favour. Minter, justifiably was not impressed by this logic, being the sole creator of the company's product. An inevitable split followed, with Jones leaving Llamasoft to form Interceptor Micros. A tense rivalry between these two companies would continue throughout the rest of the decade until Interceptors' demise in 1990.

In the US there was also a small problem for the proposed distribution of Defenda - Atari. Word was out that they were starting to get fed up with third party unlicensed versions of arcade games that they owned the rights to and were possibly about to take the matter to the courts. In this environment there was no question of the game being released in its current form. In the UK the game had been re-named Andes Attack in an effort to no-so-blatantly rip of Defender. Later, after a visit to see The Empire Strikes Back, Minter hit on the idea of changing the game's graphics and tweaking the game-play in an attempt at recreating Empire's Hoth battle-scenes, replacing the film's AT-AT walkers with the next best thing that came to mind.. camels. The resulting Attack of the Mutant Camels or AMC is one of Llamasoft's most memorable releases of the Vic 8-bit era.

The biggest success of Minter's fledgling career was just around the corner however. At the time Minter was frequenting a lot of trade events and shows touting his growing Llamasoft catalogue and thus spending a lot of time around the UK capital.

'After each day's show was over we'd sometimes head off into London to eat or to go to the arcades in the West End, and at that time the excellent movie 'Blade Runner' was just out in cinemas and the walls of the Tube had many posters up advertising it. I hadn't yet seen the movie myself but the posters were striking. The name of the film and the typeface of the font looked interesting... and for some reason I was thinking about the next game I wanted to do, which I wanted to be another unexpanded Vic game but wasn't sure what it would be like at that point. And while staring at one of the Blade Runner posters waiting for the Tube, the name 'Grid Runner' popped into my head'.

Minter had been toying with the idea of updating the Centipede concept for a while, and decided to start work on a new game design implementing his ideas. Updating the game's background to a futuristic-looking grid setting and creating new enemies such as the infamous 'grid zapper' while also increasing the frenetic pace of the original, Minter named his modest new creation Grid Runner, and mailed off a copy to HES in the US awaiting a verdict on what he thought was a good, if not particularly commercially viable game. What happened next could never have occurred to him in his wildest imagination...

Continued in RGCD #04...

Sources: 'The History of LLamasoft' (www.llamasoft.co.uk), Google Tech Talk - 19.03.07