Llamasoft sold one programmer’s games and nobody else’s. When the partners who helped Jeff Minter start the label in 1982 wanted to fill its catalogue with other people’s programs, Minter refused: “I put my hoof down and insisted that Llamasoft would sell only my games.” The label that resulted was run from his parents’ house in Tadley, Hampshire, with his mother taking the money at computer shows, and it spent the 1980s selling fast shooters full of llamas, camels and sheep to customers who, as Minter put it in 1985, “know who I am and that I exist anyway”. Minter’s own life and work are covered in his Vault entry; this entry is about the business.
Fast facts
- Formed: 21 March 1982, by the family’s reckoning, at first as a partnership.
- Address: 49 Mount Pleasant, Tadley, Hampshire, through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
- Early games: Defenda (renamed Andes Attack), Traxx, Abductor and Gridrunner for the VIC-20; Attack of the Mutant Camels for the Commodore 64.
- Overseas: Human Engineered Software (HES, later HesWare) published Minter’s games in America.
- Later: Iridis Alpha (1986) with Hewson; Trip-A-Tron for the Atari ST; Llamatron as shareware in 1991.
A partnership that lasted six months
A History of Llamasoft, the book Minter wrote with his father Patrick in 2009, tells the founding in detail. Minter had been selling ZX81 programs through a company in Great Yarmouth. A neighbour, whom the book calls only “Smeghead”, and his father persuaded him to sell his own games instead, with them handling the business side for 70% of the profits. Minter’s mother would not accept that split and insisted on 50:50. Patrick’s diary for 21 March 1982 records one word, “LLAMAS!”, which he later took to be the day Llamasoft was formed.
The first games were small VIC-20 programs, advertised in “a small square in the reader ads section, printed out on a Vic-20 dot matrix printer”. One of them, Bomb Buenos Aires, was released during the Falklands War. The Daily Telegraph of 5 June 1982 reported it from a Commodore show in Hammersmith, attributing it to “Lamma Software of Tadley”; after complaints it was reissued as Bomber.
At that Hammersmith show Llamasoft had a trestle table, a television and a VIC-20 running Defenda, Minter’s version of Defender for the 8K-expanded VIC. The family had duplicated about two hundred cassettes by hand and folded the printed inserts, and they sold out on the first day. A visitor from the American publisher HES, Jay Balakrishnan, asked for the game on a VIC-20 cartridge. Because Atari held the home rights to Defender, Minter changed the graphics, replaced the humanoids with llamas and renamed the British version Andes Attack; the American cartridge became Aggressor.
The partnership did not survive the summer. The Minters and their partners disagreed over money and over what Llamasoft should sell, and they separated formally on 19 September 1982, after the Personal Computer World Show at the Barbican. The Minters kept the Llamasoft name and the copyright in Minter’s games. In the days that followed he wrote Gridrunner for the unexpanded VIC-20 and posted a tape to HES, which had asked to see any new games. HES released it in America, where COMPUTE!’s Gazette was calling it “HesWare’s hit game Gridrunner” by September 1983.
Mail order, newsletters and distributors
Llamasoft sold by post and in person. Its address, 49 Mount Pleasant, Tadley, appears in Minter’s Zzap!64 column in July 1985, in the label’s advertisements, and in magazines as late as 1991. A Zzap!64 advertisement in August 1985 offered the Llamasoft Newsletter (“prop. and editor Jeff Minter”) free for a stamped addressed envelope, quoting the trade paper MicroScope: “If you don’t get a copy, beg, borrow or steal one.”
Minter was blunt about how the trade treated a label that did not advertise. “My major beef with distributors is that they don’t really look at the games themselves, they look at the advertising budget and we don’t place a lot of advertising,” he told Zzap!64 at Christmas 1985. In his first Zzap!64 column he had complained that “distributors which don’t distribute” had “virtually killed” Ancipital. The same Christmas interview dealt with trade-press reports that Ariolasoft had bought Llamasoft. “No,” Minter said: Ariolasoft was marketing one game, Batalyx, as “an experimental deal, to see if they can market our stuff better than we can”, and had “no rights as such to anything else I do”. In 1986 Iridis Alpha was published with Hewson, and Zzap!64 credited it to “Llamasoft/Hewson”.
Light synthesisers
Llamasoft also sold programs that were not games. Psychedelia on the Commodore 64 was followed by Colourspace and then Trip-A-Tron for the Atari ST, which its own advertising billed as a “creative graphics performance tool”. ACE reported in April 1989 that Minter had devoted “an uncommercially large chunk of his programming effort” to Trip-A-Tron, “which contains over 28,000 lines of assembler”. It cost £35. Llamasoft also sold Merak, a £12.95 video of Trip-A-Tron graphics set to a concept album by the electronic musician Adrian Wagner.
The same ACE feature was mostly about someone else’s work: Alex Blok’s company Technation, whose Archimedes-based light show, the Bit Bopper, was being developed under the name Project Flashdance. Minter and Blok, ACE reported, were “talking about the common ground which the Bit Bopper and Trip-A-Tron share”, and considering a joint product. For now, it added, “Jeff has returned to writing shoot-em-ups to earn money”. The panel on Merak ended with the Tadley address and a plea: “Go on, give a talented old hippy a bit of support!”
Llamatron and the £5 honesty box
In 1991 Llamasoft released a full game as shareware. Llamatron, a shoot-’em-up in which a laser-armed llama rescues sheep, llamas and camels, came out first on the Atari ST. ST Format’s cover disk in July 1991 explained the terms: copy it freely, and if you play it more than once, send Minter a fiver. In return he promised “a free Llamatron poster, a Llamasoft Newsletter and an extra, free, complete, classic game; Andes Attack”. The magazine thought it “the first time a complete, full-price-style game has been released in this way”.
Amiga Computing put the Amiga version on its cover disk in October 1991, introducing Llamasoft as “possibly the world’s freakiest software house”, which had followed “a determined path of sheep, llama, and camel-fixation”. Its instructions gave the same deal: “if you like it and want to play it some more, and you’re an honest person, you’ll send £5 to: LLAMASOFT, 49 Mount Pleasant, Tadley, Hants RG26 6BN.”
Three years later Minter wrote Tempest 2000 for Atari’s Jaguar, and Llamasoft went on releasing his games on later machines long after the Tadley years.
Sources
- Jeff Minter and Patrick Minter, A History of Llamasoft (Llamasoft, 2009): Part 7, pp. 99–104 (the partnership, the 70% and 50:50 dispute, 21 March 1982); Part 8, pp. 105–127 (the first VIC-20 games and adverts, Bomb Buenos Aires and the Daily Telegraph of 5 June 1982, the Hammersmith show and Defenda, HES and Jay Balakrishnan, Andes Attack and Aggressor, “only my games”, the separation on 19 September 1982, Gridrunner).
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette vol. 1 no. 3, September 1983: “HesWare’s hit game Gridrunner”.
- Zzap!64 issue 1, May 1985: Minter’s column (“distributors which don’t distribute”, Ancipital).
- Zzap!64 issue 3, July 1985: Minter’s column, with the 49 Mount Pleasant, Tadley address.
- Zzap!64 issue 4, August 1985: Llamasoft Newsletter advertisement quoting MicroScope.
- Zzap!64 issue 9, Christmas Special 1985, p. 82: interview with Minter (Ariolasoft and Batalyx, distributors and advertising).
- Zzap!64 issues 19 and 20, November and December 1986: Iridis Alpha (Llamasoft/Hewson).
- ACE issue 19, April 1989, pp. 32–33: Technation, the Bit Bopper and Project Flashdance; the Trip-A-Tron and Merak panel (28,000 lines, £35, £12.95, the Tadley address).
- ST Format issue 24, July 1991: Llamatron cover disk and its shareware terms.
- Amiga Computing issue 41, October 1991: Llamatron cover disk (“possibly the world’s freakiest software house”; the £5 terms).