“You can tell a Llamasoft game by just one glance at the screen,” Jeff Minter wrote in the first issue of Zzap!64, in May 1985. He was 23, had been selling games under the Llamasoft name for three years, and was explaining why. “When I write a game, I’m writing for those people who like my game style.” That style (fast shooting, pulsing colour, llamas, camels and sheep, and a running commentary from the author) stayed recognisable across the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, the Atari ST, the Atari Jaguar and the consoles that followed.
Fast facts
- Born: 22 April 1962, Reading.
- Company: Llamasoft, formed in March 1982, based in Tadley, Hampshire, through the 1980s.
- Early games: Gridrunner (1982), Attack of the Mutant Camels (1983), Ancipital, Iridis Alpha (1986).
- Light synthesisers: Psychedelia (1984), Colourspace (1985), Trip-A-Tron (1988), the Virtual Light Machine.
- Later games: Tempest 2000 (Atari Jaguar, 1994), Space Giraffe (2007), TxK (2014), Polybius (2017), Akka Arrh (2023).
From the PET to Llamasoft
Minter learned to program at college in Hampshire, on a Commodore PET, after watching another student play a game he had typed in himself. In A History of Llamasoft, the book he wrote with his father Patrick in 2009, he describes working out what the PET’s memory did by poking numbers into it, and writing his first games in BASIC before moving on to 6502 machine code.
His first sales came through a company in Great Yarmouth. In early 1982 it marketed his version of Centipede for the Sinclair ZX81 and a routine that gave the ZX81 higher-resolution graphics. Minter had never played the arcade Centipede: “I’d heard of Centipede and even seen pictures of the screen”, he writes, so his version had a Space Invaders-style gun and centipedes that dropped bombs. The Minters felt badly paid for the work. On 21 March 1982 Patrick’s diary recorded one word, “LLAMAS!”, which he later took to be the day Llamasoft was formed.
Gridrunner and the camels
Gridrunner was written for the unexpanded VIC-20, with 3.5K of memory, and it started as another Centipede-style game. Atari was threatening the makers of arcade clones at the time, so Minter changed the design. The name came to him on the London Underground, in front of a Blade Runner poster. The centipedes became “droids” on a grid, the mushrooms became pods that turned into bombs, and two lasers moved along the edges of the grid and fired at intervals, creating a new pod where their beams crossed. Minter describes “the rhythmic pulsing of the lasers and the deep electronic throb” giving the game a “heartbeat”. A Llamasoft advertisement in Computer and Video Games in March 1983 offered Gridrunner for the unexpanded VIC-20 and Gridrunner 64 for the Commodore 64. There was also an Atari 8-bit version, and in America HesWare published the game. COMPUTE!’s Gazette called it “HesWare’s hit game Gridrunner” in September 1983.
For his first large Commodore 64 game Minter borrowed from Parker Brothers’ The Empire Strikes Back for the Atari 2600, in which the player circles and shoots at huge Imperial Walkers. Computer and Video Games had described those walkers as “giant, mechanical camels”. “Now, I like camels,” Minter writes, and Attack of the Mutant Camels followed, with “90-foot-high, neutronium-shielded, laser-spitting Mutant Camels of Doom”. Each camel is four sprites joined together, because a single sprite, even expanded, was not big enough.
Not every game found shops. In the Zzap!64 column Minter complained that “distributors which don’t distribute” had “virtually killed” Ancipital, even though it had been Personal Computer Games’ Game of the Month in the month it came out. Later C64 games included Iridis Alpha, published with Hewson in 1986.
Light synthesisers
From 1984 Minter was also writing programs that were not games. Psychedelia, on the Commodore 64, was the first of them. Minter describes a “long standing interest in creating an interactive ‘graphics synthesiser’”: a program played like a musical instrument, making pictures instead of sounds. Zzap!64’s first issue reported that Psychedelia was “apparently just too original for some distributors”, who could not decide whether it was an arcade game or something else. In 1985 Minter was demonstrating a version for Atari’s computers, Colourspace, on Atari’s stand at the Hanover show, and Trip-A-Tron followed on the Atari ST.
By the early 1990s he was working with two others on the Virtual Light Machine, a music visualiser built on Transputer processors.
Tempest 2000
In 1994 Minter wrote Tempest 2000 for Atari’s Jaguar console, a new version of Atari’s 1981 vector arcade game Tempest. He used the same kind of generated, abstract effects he had been building into the Virtual Light Machine: “the original coin-op ‘Tempest’ was already beautifully abstract”, he writes, “and there was no need to approximate any form of realism”. ST Format gave it 97% in June 1994 and billed it as “the highest scoring game ever”. The visualiser in the Jaguar CD unit, also called VLM, grew out of the same work. Minter then followed with Defender 2000 for the Jaguar, and Tempest 3000 and VLM-2 in 2000 for the Nuon DVD system, which Minter says were little known because of “the unfortunate lack of uptake of the NUON technology”.
Later work
Llamasoft kept releasing games after the Jaguar. The main titles, according to later secondary summaries, were Space Giraffe for Xbox 360 in 2007, TxK for the PlayStation Vita in 2014, Polybius for PlayStation 4 in 2017 and a new version of Atari’s 1982 arcade game Akka Arrh in 2023. In 2015 Atari threatened legal action over TxK, which it said was too similar to Tempest 2000, and planned versions for other machines were not released. Minter lives in Wales with his partner and collaborator Ivan “Giles” Zorzin.
His own writing
Minter explained his games in print from the start: in the instructions and in magazine columns. His Zzap!64 column ran from the magazine’s first issue, and he used it to argue about the industry as well as to report on his own work. A History of Llamasoft is his account, with his father’s, of the years up to Gridrunner and Attack of the Mutant Camels, and a short history of the Gridrunner games up to Gridrunner Revolution (2009).
Sources
- Zzap!64 issue 1, May 1985: Jeff Minter’s column (“You can tell a Llamasoft game by just one glance at the screen”; distributors and Ancipital; Psychedelia); introduced as “now regular Zzap columnist”.
- Zzap!64 issue 3, July 1985: Minter’s column (demonstrating Colourspace at the Hanover show; Llamasoft’s address at 49 Mount Pleasant, Tadley).
- Zzap!64 issues 18 and 19, October and November 1986: Iridis Alpha (Llamasoft/Hewson).
- Computer and Video Games issue 17, March 1983: Llamasoft advertisement (Gridrunner, Gridrunner 64).
- Jeff Minter and Patrick Minter, A History of Llamasoft (Llamasoft, 2009): Parts 1–7 (the PET, the ZX81 work for a Great Yarmouth company, the founding of Llamasoft), Part 9 (Attack of the Mutant Camels), “A History Of…. Gridrunner” and “Visual Synthesis” (Psychedelia, the Virtual Light Machine, Tempest 2000, VLM and Tempest 3000).
- COMPUTE!’s Gazette vol. 1 no. 3, September 1983, report from the summer Consumer Electronics Show: HesWare showing Attack of the Mutant Camels, “a sequel to HesWare’s hit game Gridrunner”.
- ST Format issue 55, February 1994, news: Minter finishing his first Jaguar game, Tempest 2000.
- ST Format issue 59, June 1994, contents page: Tempest 2000 at 97%, “the highest scoring game ever”.
- Wikipedia, “Jeff Minter” (web, secondary): date and place of birth; Trip-A-Tron (1988); Space Giraffe, TxK and the Atari dispute, Polybius, Akka Arrh; home in Wales with Ivan Zorzin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter