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### LLAMASOFT - The Dromedary Years

#### (Part Two)

#### Article By M. Bevan

Continued from RGCD #03...

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.

We take up our story a short while after Jeff has submitted an a little computer program called Gridrunner to American software publisher HES. What happened next could never have occurred to him in his wildest imagination...

'A week or so later the phone rings at 4AM and I shamble out of bed to answer the call. I was a little upset, as I'm the kind of beast who likes to leap out of bed at the crack of noon. On the other end, a little blurred by satellite delay, an American voice ranted about some game that they've been playing for eight hours solid. The voice informed me that I should expect significant monetary input. Bemused, I made a few notes on the pad by the phone and returned to bed. Waking later, at a time closer to my usual emergence, I made myself a really strong cup of tea and remembered some weird dream, something about a game... went to the phone, found the note, and was intrigued'.

Grid Runner peaked at number one in the US software charts, much to Minter's surprise, earning Llamasoft not only its first US bona-fide smash hit but a significant financial boost. Exhausted by two years of constant coding, Minter decided to take a well-earned holiday to Peru to be with the llamas. On returning to the UK Minter would release several more Vic 20 games including Traxx (a Painter clone) and Metagalactic Llamas Battle At The Edge of Time (an attempt to release a game with the silliest title he could think of and the first to feature his company's namesake creature). He followed up Grid Runner with a new sequel, Matrix, which was also well received in the US, before moving on to code for Commodore's new flagship machine the C64, his own machine a gift from HES prior to Grid Runner's huge success. After converting Attack of the Mutant Camels and Matrix to the C64, and creating the Tempest-esque Laser Zone, Minter started work on what would become one of his most famous games, if only in Europe.

'I was feeling well guilty about the fact that the camels got shot up in AMC, as camels are in fact lovely beasties, so I wanted to make a game where they rose up against their evil ZZyaxxian masters and fought back. At the time, people were freaking out about the fact that Manic Miner had 20 levels, which seemed like a huge amount back then - so I decided to one up Manic Miner and put 42 levels into this game. I could have put more but 42 seemed like a decent number of levels, especially as 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything.'

Revenge of the Mutant Camels was one of Llamasoft's weirdest, most psychedelic games to date, and the first to really make use of the C64's advanced capabilities such as raster-interrupt techniques to produce ultra-smooth scrolling backgrounds and full multi-channel sound emulation through SID. It was a hugely well received game in its native UK, receiving rave reviews from many computing magazines, including a prestigious Game of the Month accolade from Personal Computer Games magazine. RMC also marked the point when Minter's games finally fully developed the distinctive and surreal Llamasoft iconography, containing a whole bestiary of sheep, goats, llamas and camels, along with the likes of flying CND symbols, telephone boxes, Rizla packets and Battlestar Galactica reject base-stars.

However HES, whose partnership with Llamasoft had proved so fruitful with Grid Runner and Matrix, did not like the game, and refused to distribute it in the US, forcing Minter to develop solely for the UK and European markets, the only one where his games were still attracting positive press attention and where he was gradually starting to accumulate a cult following. Llamasoft's next title, the highly entertaining comedy 'mow'-emup Hovver Bovver was co-designed by one of Minter's biggest fans.. his father. Inspired by the 'Painter' concept he'd already explored in Traxx, it was an unexpected but very welcome addition to the Llamasoft canon. Minter then returned spectacularly to the shoot'em up genre with a release that was arguably his best piece of game design to date.

Sheep In Space was a horizontally-scrolling shooter following in the Defender tradition that featured as its unlikely hero an Interstellar Space Sheep. The player piloted their extremely agile ovine between two opposing planet surfaces, aiming to prevent enemies from building up charge on a Planet Buster gun, which would if activated destroy the planet and expunge the fleecy flier into the depths of space. As well as having to contend with this potentially catastrophic outcome the gamer needed to keep their sheep well fed in order that it did not explode due to hunger. The game mechanics and control system of Sheep in Space were beautifully contrived, with excellent gravitational and inertial effects as the player raced frantically against the clock and their own hunger to destroy enemy 'charge-carriers' aiming to prime the planet for destruction.

Minter's next game, Ancipital (known to fans as simply Cippy - a character first appearing in Sheep in Space) was yet another highly ambitious and original design. Similar in concept to Ultimate's Attic Attac the player battled through a grid of one hundred levels (or rooms) in order to reach the final chamber. Cippy retained its predecessor's gravitational anomalies with players only being able to walk on floors, ceilings and walls through use of a totally unprecedented control system, and once mastered was a wonderfully surreal and enjoyable gaming experience. Ancipital deservedly earned Llamasoft their second and final PCG Game of the Month Award and is seen by many as a spiritual 8-bit predecessor to the classic Llamatron. Unfortunately sales figures for the game were not as good as expected due to distribution issues which meant the game was far harder to find in high-street stores than RMC had been.

Llamasoft's final four C64 releases mark a period of wild experimentation as Minter pursued increasingly offbeat design directions, a move that was to baffle certain members of the gaming community who had begun having difficulty grasping the sometimes over-ambitious concepts in his games. Infamously, one of the most well documented cases of a Llamasoft game causing such all-round bewilderment was with the release of Mama Llama. A sort of semi-sequel to Revenge, this game had an unusual control mode where the player did not actually control the onscreen Llama character and her family, merely attempting to defend them by shooting enemies with an on-screen floating drone. It introduced a non-sequential level structure where players could choose their own path through the game. A difficult game to master, it's low level of immediate playability compared to other Llamasoft titles and it's subsequent poor review score (59%) in the debut issue of Zzap! 64 led to a very public and long-running stand-off between the famous C64 magazine and Minter himself, during which he allegedly visited the offices and ceremoniously burnt a copy of the Zzap! review with staff writer Gary Penn's own cigarette lighter.

Batalyx, a strange but enjoyable collection of mini-games, and Iridis Alpha, an odd and extremely experimental scrolling shooter played across two screens simultaneously scrolling in opposite directions, restored the rift somewhat, receiving 'Sizzler' awards in subsequent issues of ZZap! 64, but the games market and public tastes were changing, and for the remainder of the 8-bit era Llamasoft never really recaptured the popularity that they had had around the release of Revenge of the Mutant Camels.

'The videogame business was changing around this time away from something I could actively participate in' says Minter regretfully. Although continuing to experiment with projects such as the 'Lightsynth' Psychedelia, and releasing the compilation Yak's Progress, featuring the best of his more popular Commodore 64 work, Llamasoft was finding it increasingly hard to find distributors and by the time Ariolasoft, who had marketed Iridis and Batalyx but had received limited financial success with them pulled the plug on releasing Revenge of the Mutant Camels 2, Minter made the decision to give the title away free on a Zzap! cover tape such was his desire that fans might get actually get to play it.

Minter would dabble with the 16 bit Amiga and Atari ST over the next few years but, unable to find a publisher for any new titles, was forced to look for employment elsewhere. This would include a seven month stint at Konix developing Attack of the Mutant Camels '89 for the company's later discontinued console, and a two month game design role for Atari for another console which failed to get off the ground, the Atari Panther. Disillusioned, Minter returned to what he did best, namely making games he wanted to play himself. The resulting ST title, Llamatron, a brilliant Robotron clone, was released as shareware, an at the time untested method of sale for Llamasoft. Unsure what to expect, Minter was extremely touched to find himself inundated with payments from loyal games fans who enjoyed the game and wanted to pay him for it. Encouraged by this response Minter continued releasing shareware titles on the Llamasoft label while producing what is his post 8-bit master-work, Tempest 2000 for Atari's Jaguar console. In following Tempest with Defender 2000, again for Atari, it had all come full circle for the hairy one after writing the Vic20 program that would become Andes Attack, and which had led to Llamasoft's first, albeit small success back in 1982.

Jeff Minter has recently completed work on the phenomenal Space Giraffe for the XBox 360's Arcade Live which he has released like all his titles since Llamatron, on the Llamasoft label for a small 'shareware' style fee. I wish him the very best of luck.

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