Early in 1983 a review in Computer and Video Games gave Jeff Minter an idea. The magazine had described the Imperial Walkers in Parker Brothers’ The Empire Strikes Back, a game for the Atari VCS, as “giant, mechanical camels”. “Now, I like camels,” Minter wrote later. “I like camels a lot.” His first full game for the new Commodore 64 became his own version of that VCS game, with the walkers replaced by “90-foot-high, neutronium-shielded, laser-spitting Mutant Camels of Doom”.
Attack of the Mutant Camels became one of Llamasoft’s best-known games. It also became one of the most confusing titles in its catalogue, because in America the same name went on a completely different game.
Fast facts
- Author: Jeff Minter, for his own label, Llamasoft, of Tadley, Hampshire.
- Released: early 1983 for the Commodore 64. Llamasoft’s spring 1984 advertisements sold it at £7.50 on cassette.
- Atari 8-bit: advertised in August 1984 as a “Commodore classic now available for all ATARI machines”.
- Inspiration: Parker Brothers’ The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari VCS.
- In America: HesWare’s Attack of the Mutant Camels is a different game, Minter’s Gridrunner sequel Matrix.
Bolting camels together
Parker Brothers’ game was a Defender-style horizontal scroller with a scanner, in which the player circled a column of lumbering walkers and shot each one many times before it fell. Minter kept that design. Llamasoft’s advertisement explained the job: fly “your tiny, manoeuvrable fighter over the mountainous landscape to weaken and destroy the camels before they invade the humans’ stronghold”, while dodging “withering laser fire and alien UFOs”. The action stretched over ten screen lengths, with a scanner and a two-player option. As Computer and Video Games warned in its first news item about the game, it took “several direct hits” on a camel’s neutronium shields to bring it down.
The Commodore 64 was new to Minter, who had written his earlier hits for the VIC-20. He started by writing his own tools: a character editor for the game’s font, and a sprite editor for the bullets, the player’s ship, the scanner and an AMC logo. The C64’s hardware sprites were too small for the camels he wanted, even in their double-size mode. So he used four of them “all bolted together to make one huge camel sprite”. He was not proud of the result. His camels, he admitted, ended up “looking like two fat men in a pantomime Mutant Camel suit”.
The scrolling was rough too. Minter had not yet learned to use raster interrupts or the C64’s fine-scroll registers, so the landscape moved “in a somewhat chunky fashion”. He added collisions, lives, scores, a hyperspace sequence between levels and a title screen on which the AMC logo formed out of sprites, and the game was done in a few weeks. To him it was his “first proper C64 game, since it at least attempted to use some of the new Commodore’s extra hardware”.
The font outlived the game. Minter’s character set for Attack of the Mutant Camels, refined for its sequel, turned up in other companies’ games, which annoyed him “somewhat, but not a huge amount”.
One name, two games
In the middle of the work Jay Balakrishnan of the American publisher HES rang from California, at about four in the morning British time, to say how much his staff liked Minter’s VIC-20 game Gridrunner and to ask for a C64 version quickly. The camels waited while Minter made it. When Attack of the Mutant Camels was finished, he sent that to HES as well. HES did not want it.
A few months later Minter sent HES Matrix, his larger sequel to Gridrunner. This time HES liked the game but not its name, and asked to call it Attack of the Mutant Camels. “They didn’t like the game of AMC but they liked the name, and they didn’t like the name of Matrix but they did like the game,” Minter wrote. In America Attack of the Mutant Camels therefore means HesWare’s Matrix. COMPUTE!’s Gazette, reporting from the summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1983, described HesWare’s Attack of the Mutant Camels, for both the VIC-20 and the C64, as “a sequel to HesWare’s hit game Gridrunner”, and a HesWare advertisement the following February asked, “Would you believe Attack of the Mutant Camels??” Everywhere else, the name means the camel game. Retro Gamer summed it up in 2005: the game “was another hit in the UK, but there was some confusion in the US”.
Reception and sequels
In Britain the game sold alongside Llamasoft’s other titles at the computer shows where Minter and his parents set up a table of machines and let people play. It was one of the two main attractions on their stand at the Commodore Show at Westminster Central Hall on 26 February 1983, and at Birmingham’s Midland Computer Show that spring Minter’s father recorded that it “attracted favourable comments and good sales”.
Its sequel, Revenge of the Mutant Camels (1984), turned the tables: the player became the camel. Personal Computer Games made it Game of the Month in February 1984 and recalled the first game as one in which “you used space ships to try to stop advancing alien camels – a scene cribbed from The Empire Strikes Back”. Minter answered a common question about the sequel in the same magazine’s April issue. People asked how he had fitted more than eight sprites into it, he wrote, “to which I simply reply: I didn’t!” The trick was designing a game that only needed eight.
The camels kept coming back. Batalyx (1985) included “an enhanced Attack of the Mutant Camels” among its six sub-games, and Revenge of the Mutant Camels II, which Zzap!64 called “the third chapter of the Camels series”, came out at £2.99 on Mastertronic Added Dimension in 1987. In 1989 Minter worked on Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89 for the Konix Multi-System, a console that was never released, so the game was left unfinished.
Later life
In 2011 the Smithsonian American Art Museum chose the C64 game for its 2012 exhibition The Art of Video Games. Digital Eclipse’s Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, an interactive history released on 13 March 2024 for modern consoles and PC, includes the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit versions and the unfinished Konix game.
The Konix game’s source code survives because of luck. Minter’s own copies were lost, but an early build, version 0.4, turned up on a batch of test disks, and in November 2012 Games That Weren’t reported that Minter had given permission for it to be released. The source is on GitHub, together with code for the C64 and Atari 8-bit versions, released “with the kind permission of its original author – Jeff Minter”.
Sources
- Jeff Minter and Patrick Minter, A History of Llamasoft (Llamasoft, 2009): Part 9, pp. 128–139 (the Empire Strikes Back game and the C&VG review; the tools; four sprites to a camel; the chunky scrolling; Balakrishnan’s phone call; the finished game; HES turning it down); Part 10, pp. 140–141 and 148–149 (the Commodore Show of 26 February 1983; the borrowed character set; Matrix renamed by HES); Part 11, p. 157 (the Midland Computer Show).
- Computer and Video Games issue 19, May 1983, p. 16: news of Llamasoft’s new Commodore 64 game (the camels, the cannon and scanners, “several direct hits”).
- Computer and Video Games issue 34, August 1984, p. 93: Llamasoft advertisement for the Atari version.
- Your Computer, March 1984, p. 158: Llamasoft advertisement (the fighter, the stronghold, ten screen lengths, scanner, two-player option, £7.50 for the Commodore 64). Commodore Computing International, May 1984: price lists at £7.50.
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette vol. 1 no. 3, September 1983, p. 58: report from the summer Consumer Electronics Show (HesWare’s Attack of the Mutant Camels, “a sequel to HesWare’s hit game Gridrunner”). Vol. 2 no. 8, February 1984, p. 65: HesWare advertisement (“Would you believe Attack of the Mutant Camels??”).
- Personal Computer Games issue 3, February 1984, p. 84: Revenge of the Mutant Camels review and Game of the Month (the first game recalled). Issue 5, April 1984, p. 128: Minter on sprites and Revenge.
- Zzap!64 issue 7, November 1985, p. 49: Batalyx news (six sub-games, “an enhanced Attack of the Mutant Camels”). Issue 30, October 1987: Revenge of the Mutant Camels II review (“the third chapter of the Camels series”).
- Retro Gamer issue 12, 2005: Llamasoft feature (the US confusion; Minter playing the unreleased Mutant Camels ’89 in the Konix Power Chair).
- Kotaku, “The Smithsonian has picked the games of its Art of Video Games exhibition”, 5 May 2011 (web, secondary), and Wikipedia, “The Art of Video Games” (web, secondary): the selection and the 2012 exhibition. https://kotaku.com/the-smithsonian-has-picked-the-games-of-its-art-of-vide-5799017
- Digital Eclipse, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, game page (web, secondary): the C64, Atari 8-bit and Konix versions included. https://www.digitaleclipse.com/games/llamasoft. Video Games Chronicle, “Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story will be released in March”, 21 February 2024 (web, secondary): the release date. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/llamasoft-the-jeff-minter-story-will-be-released-in-march/
- Games That Weren’t, “Attack of the Mutant Camels 1989 recovered”, 18 November 2012 (web, secondary). https://gamesthatwerent.com/2012/11/attack-of-the-mutant-camels-1989-recovered. Source code repository (web, secondary): https://github.com/mwenge/attackofthemutantcamels