Commodore Free 23/Commodore_Free_Issue_23_2008_Commodore_Computer_Club.d64/t.llamasoft

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LLAMASOFT - The Dromedary Years
(Part One) Article Written By Michael
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 heard 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 in
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 instani 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
& I was very bored because I was in a
maths & physics course, and I wasn't
interested in maths & physics, I was
interested in playing with computers.
So in due time 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 Commission after
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...

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

  CONTINUED NEXT MONTH

Many thanks to Retro Gamer CD
www.rgcd.co.uk and to Michael Bevan
for agreeing to the reprint of this
article

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