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Part 2 of Jeff Minter's History of Llamasoft Published
Tmuk writes "The second part of Jeff Minter's Complete History of Llamasoft has just gone up over at The Way of the Rodent. Straight from the man himself, it's a fantastic read after the previously Slashdot-covered first part. Enjoy!"
Where did all those galaxian table top video games go?
I haven't been able to source a working copy of this game since 1995 - at least not one that will run under the later versions of Windows. Anyone know?
Jeff Minter made some really whacked out games back in the day. No one could ever accuse him of being unoriginal with some of his titles.... (except maybe in the Llama department) in fact most of the games he made MUST have been done when he was high or something... and usually had something to do with Llamas.
So maybe "Attack of the Mutant Camels" was an Atari2600 "Empire Strikes back" rip-off and "Sheep in Space" was a weird "Defender"-like game, but just fire up your C64 emulator and look at "Batalyx" or "Anticipal". I suppose the experience of those games is multiplied further if you've downed a few magic mushrooms beforehand.
"Hovver Bovver" must have been one of the most interesting third-person mow-the-lawn-ups I've ever played too. Gimme back my mower!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Just wondering if any gamers actually own a PET. Reading the article tempts me to own one (esp if I can get it for really cheap).
I have played only a couple of time on a tabletop aracade , wonder why they got phased, I for one would like to play on one today too( maybe with fancier graphics with alpha blending and all !!)
PET therapy works
Jeff rocks - my first machine was a Vic 20 and my first game Gridrunner - my second machine was a C64 and my first game on that was Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Jeff has defined my decidedly warped computer existence!!
Am I the only one who read the title and thought this was about Winamp?
A lot of old memories in his article... It brings it all back.
Some of us followed different paths, but I guess if you're in that age group and reading slashdot, there's a very good chance you've probably had many of the same experiences, thoughts and memories that Jeff Minter shares...
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Two . Colour, Sound, Poking Around.
.Enterprise. (a PET graphic character that was meant to be similarly shaped playing-card club symbol) across sectors of the galaxy in real-time using the keyboard, one sector per screen. Sometimes, you would encounter a .Klingon. or a .Romulan. (cue more PET playing-card symbols) and a firefight would ensue, with everyone firing straight and diagonal line characters at the other (.lasers.).
.ship. from opposite ends of the keyboard (a bit cramped, since the PET keyboard was tiny) and bumbled around, sniping at each another (one of the ships was just an X-shaped graphics character, so of course whoever had that was said to have the X-Wing). Ahh, you needed real imagination to flesh out your games with a little atmosphere in those days.
.graphics. characters and the keyboard, although at first sight appearing to be nicer (being actually keyboard-shaped, rather than small and weird and fiddly like the PET.s) was a bit tacky and prone to double-entering. We stuck with the PET and carried on creating and played our little games.
.Ruptured. Rawlinson was the guru of the geeks, and he had told me about some strange BASIC commands called PEEK and POKE. At first these commands seemed completely mysterious, because I had no idea what it was they actually did. I knew it was something to do with accessing parts of the machine's inner memory, and we used them mainly to try and make strange things happen by altering values in a location called, mysteriously, .zero page..
6
Back in college, we finally had enough knowledge to begin making simple games. And simple they were . to the point of being ludicrously primitive by any reasonable standards. But they were our games that we had made ourselves, and there was something immensely satisfying about playing a game with your mates and knowing that it had come entirely out of your head.
I remember writing a realtime version of those Star Trek games that were popular at the time. In mine, instead of being a turn-based game, you guided the
Out of that grew a two-player dogfight game, in which each player controlled their
The Enterprise, off of Star Trek.
A club, from out of playing cards.
We spent every spare moment in front of the PET, coding up games, watching others coding up games, or playing each other.s creations. In due course, the PET was joined by a TRS-80 Model 1, which became known to us as the Trash-80. This was a Z-80 based machine, and although we were curious about it at first, it didn't appeal so much to us gamers - it lacked the PET's
I remember that before long I began to run into difficulty as the ambitions for my games got loftier. Everything was fine as long as there weren't many objects on the screen and the environments weren't too complex. But I wanted to have many enemies on the screen at once, and gameplay arenas more complex than just a straightforward box. But BASIC was too slow and unwieldy to do some of the things that needed doing, and although I had achieved competence at BASIC programming, I really had no idea how things actually worked inside the heart of the machine.
7
We gleaned from magazines that BASIC stored some working variables in this zero page area, and by fiddling around and changing those values you could do odd things - like speeding up the flash rate of the cursor until it became a blur, or reducing the keyboard auto repeat rate so that the merest touch of a key would spew out loads of characters all at once. Sometimes, messing with these values did nothing at all, and sometimes it crashed the machine solidly. I can't say that I used PEEK and POKE on zero page to any great end, or really even knew what I was doing at all - it was all very much just voodoo. POKE about and see what happened, without really understanding why.
A Commodore Pet on top of a fridge. Recently.
The problems with my games w
Is it just me or is there a lot of companies that have strange obsesessions with llamas... Maxis and Nullsoft for example.
Moo!
This story's been up for well over an hour, and it only has 45 comments -- and most of those comments are trolls. I guess no one cares about Llamasoft...
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
Ah, someone posted this helpful link. I played a difficult and frustrating game where I killed camels using a space ship. Apparently that is what Llamasoft is all about. Very disappointing.
His writing about simple discoveries like screen memory bring back floods of memories. We all used to sit around and try to figure the machine out. We all tried to make games, though nobody I knew had the sheer creativity Jeff demonstrated early on.
Going from Basic to changing memory locations to assembly language was one of the best times I have ever had with computing. This article brings all that back as though it were yesterday.
Damn good stuff.
Blogging because I can...
There was an in depth interview with Jeff on an issue of PC FORMAT quite a few eon's ago. Plus on the coverdisk it had a copy of llamatron! I wish they had online archives of those older articles :-/
when do we get to hear about the camels????
I have to wonder what you were expecting, if you found it disappointing. If the game's called "{Attack,Revenge} of the mutant camels", how can you be disappointed to find a game involving killing camels? The clue's is the title, one would have thought...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Yeah, it's a bit freaky, from the PEEK/POKE, figuring out what char looked most like a monster or whatever, down to the Gary Numan (still love 'Films')... freaking exact.
Let's see, wouldn't POKE 1524 place a char in the center of C-64 screen?
Cool article...
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
There is nothing like making an old piece of hardware do something pretty cool; namely, more colors or sprites and such.
I really liked assembly on the 8-bit machines. Learned two core things that stick with me to this day:
(1) all computers really do is add numbers together and move them around, and
(2) the computer does exactly what you tell it to.
Number 1 was a biggie because it made the link between the nifty things like graphics and sound and numbers make some sense.
Number 2 is evident to this day. When a machine crashes, it's because somebody somewhere did not think something completely through.
Blogging because I can...
And you have to click through an advert for cannabis to get through to the pictures :-)
The minimalistic BASIC did really lead into a machine code mindset, but didn't have the built-in assembler that the BBC had.
Ah, I remember, back in the day, POKEing random numbers into addresses from 1 to 10000 and waiting for the 386 to spontanousely reboot... Memory protection is the devil, espoused by filthy operating systems rejecting the values of the pioneers.
I'll try it when I get back.
>> Young kiddies were treated to an annual Atomic Christmas Party where they got to meet Santa and were given presents
Ah, I remember going to those parties at AWRE as well, though I must be a good few years younger.
"we're taking you to a christmas party at the atomic base"
"waaahhh, dont wanna glow in the dark!"
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
More geek nostalgia..
Damn, I wouldn't know how much of my time Jeff managed to steal with his silly but amazing games.
I learnt to program on a PET. What a fantastic machine it was. Our computer room had about 8 or 9 of them. Some had big screens, some small. Some had tape decks in them, some had external ones. Some had a funny white flat keyboard, some had a proper keyboard. All were amazing :-)
:-) I can still remember some of the C64 Pokes - Poke 53280/1 for the screen colours and the classic SYS 64738 to reset!
We probably had the strangest computer room in England as well. I think it used to be a drama room, and the floor had a sort of pit in the middle with wooden steps up to the edge. The PET's were dangerously balanced around the room and in the pit.
Me and a few friends used to arrive at school early and play on the PET's and also on our teachers VIC-20 (and later his C64). He made a game which we would play (and I later re-wrote on my Amiga 500 for fun).
I feel honoured to have been around at the golden age of computing. It's not the same these days, and the magic has gone. I remember getting really excited when I managed to make my initials in three large sprites move around the screen with the joystick
The keyboard characters were brilliant as well. Without those it would have been totally different. Those characters allowed you to make almost anything you could imagine (like the Enterprise out of a club!).
Atari 2600 -> Vic-20 -> C64 -> Amiga 500 -> Amiga 1200 -> PC
The Commodore years were the best (and Zzap!64 was the best magazine I have ever read).
Paul.
(who, believe it or not, was listening to C64 remixes on the way to work in his car this morning)
Winamp was made by "NullSoft", although LLamas do feature quite prominently in their persona for some reason. Were they inspired by Llamasoft, related, or perhaps just share some common odd obsession with the creatures?
Content of an email I sent to my friends last year, after an event.. well, read:
I just had a fantastic night out. The main attractions were (as the title suggests) Mr Jeff Minter, and some curry.
For those of you who didn't know (or don't care) Jeff Minter is the genius behind games such as Andes Attack, Traxx, Gridrunner, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Hover Bovver, Tempest 2000, the incomparable Llamatron (best shoot-em-up ever) and my favourite game title of all time, Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time.
The evening started badly for me as I found myself alone at a bar, stone cold sober, stood by the man himself. I swiftly ordered their strongest lager and engaged in what I describe as 'small talk'. A few seconds later Jeff acted like most girls do when I attempt this and desparately sought rescue from random passers-by, eventually finding an event organiser and fleeing towards a Commodore 64 running one of his games.
I should mention, I found out about this by accident. I discovered something advertising curry for a tenner, which in Nottingham is a good deal, even without Jeff Minter thrown in for free. He was the ingredient to make the night perfect. Hero worship, and all that.
Anyway, things kicked off and there were 3-4 hours of general questions from the audience, scripted questions from one of the event organisers, and lots of responses and general rambling from the man himself.
Here are some of the quotes I found highly amusing. Non-Jeff-Minter-Fans, stop reading now
Unmitigated honesty about his own games: "Andes Attack itself was a pile of wank"
After revealing he wrote Gridrunner in just 7 days, "The best week's work I ever did in my life"
On the camels in Attack of the Mutant Camels, "The graphic of the camel looked like two chubby men in a camel suit" (followed up with "Camels just aren't that shape")
After being asked about the complex storyline in one of the cassette inserts for one of his games, "I just like to write bollocks"
Describing how Nullsoft apologised for nicking his feedback technique, "What they didn't apologise for, was stealing my bastard llama as well" - some resentment apparent there.
On hearing that Tempest 3k won CES Game of the Show award, "I'm like, Fucking hell!"
A games company tried to sign him, having obviously done their homework, "They said, 'We'll give you a llama on initial signing, and an option on a yak after six months" (he's since acquired two llamas anyway).
Responding to the question 'Why didn't you just blow it all in the '80s?', "I had nothing to blow, having no beasties at that time" - his continual
references and innuendos to beastiality were comical in the extreme, although I confess I lacked the guts (and indeed, the interest) to ask
whether he'd actually gone that far. He does own at least one (maybe three) sheep (one is 16 years old and called Flossie), a goat, 2 llamas and a dog.
Describing how The Artist Formerly Known As was once interested in some of his work, Jeff described Prince, "He was a very weird geezer actually" - pot, kettle, etc?
Some other random utterances: "Bugger me!", "Yay, have that you bastard", "I'm still no bloody graphic artist", "It gives me a stiffy just thinking about it" (this one in regard to some hardware he's got arriving soon), "I love llama liquid", "My sheep is throbbing", "For total headfuck convenience"
There were some others, but in retrospect they just aren't funny outside of the context they were uttered (not that I'm claiming the ones above were).
Some other interesting info: He's never seen Monsters Inc (amazing given his fur fetish), his favourite film is Bladerunner, and, in a fine quote indeed, "There's nothing wrong with fucking sheep"
Obviously the lager was hitting me hard (not least because I was hitting the lager hard) so when the quiz came about I was in no state to answer it. One question was memorable though: "This is the sound of a Nubian Goat, but what is its problem" - followed by what one must indeed presume is the sound of a Nubian Goat with a problem.
In case you care, its problem was that it was in heat. I leave you with that image.
Don't know why, but this was linked by anti-slash, either they're trying to get mods to mod it down or up or something. I recommend that the mods ignore it (if you see this, cancel your moderation by replying somewhere in here.)
Jeff Minter autographed my copy of the Tempest 2000 soundtrack CD.
:-)
I've also got a photograph of him autographing an Atari Jaguar(!) game console while on a Jaguar promotional tour in Southern California.
As if anyone cares. But where else am I going to share these little tidbits of detail?
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Minters game have always been about fun gameplay, sometimes innovating on previous arcade games sometimes his own creations. Thats why he is respected, not just a llama curiosity.
Amen to the nostalgia...
I sometimes get upset with myself that I never got beyond the BASIC stage on either the Atari 8-bit (which had a fantasic version of LOGO with turtles that looked like turtles...) or the C=64 (which had all these cool sprite and character set editors from Compute's Gazette).
ZZAP!64 rocked...it was so much better than the stuff I could get in the USA. I cherished my 1 or 2 imported copies to the Nth degree...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Dang remix.kwed.org being down! :-(
Yeah, I hope it's back soon. I still have to get round to making my own collections of some RKO stuff for the car. I only have the Back In Time discs on CD. Monty on the Run from BIT 1 is my favourite remix ever. I saw MotR played live by a violinist or fiddler (not sure which) in London a few years ago. I thought he was going to explode near the end! It's quite fast :-)
I do see your point, however mine remains. The computer does do exactly what we tell it to do. The hardware in the case of your C64 examples, *does* do what they told it to. (Within limits of course)
The sound chip one I agree with.
Point being that we are generally the problem with computers more times than not. Secondary point being, the first point has a *lot* to do with which computer and software you actually choose to use.
We both are sitting at the extremes on this. Hardware faults aside, I do believe my early lesson largely applies today. When something crashes, I first look at what I just did, then work backward on the general idea that the level of thought goes up as you move down the chain ov events that lead to the machine in use.
When it clearly doesn't, that is where my first inclination as to the poor quality of the system in use. BTW, this is exactly why I much prefer *NIX systems to other ones these days.
I guess, I was not considering hardware issues. In my mind, these are all part of the process that leads to good quality computing. There is little difference between issuing software instructions in ram and programming logic gates. If you bend the rules....
Blogging because I can...
it is exactly these little hacks and tricks that made the 8-bitters so damn much fun. In order to get the machine to do something cool, you basically had to have a pretty firm understanding of the thing. For a young coder, this means:
- base 2 & 16 notation and basic mathmatics
- understanding of the differences between ROM, RAM and memory mapped I/O registers. (Controllers, graphics and sound chips)
- assembly language
- making the basic abstract leaps between the math and the game elements. (The toughest part really)
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Funny the VIC 20 actually ran faster than the C64 did. Today we would call it shared memory or UMA. Both the CPU and the graphics chips worked from the same RAM. Turn off the graphics and you get about 10 percent higher performance.
The VIC had about half the resolution the C64 did, so that means have the DMA graphics memory access. Faster machine.
Blogging because I can...
All the French sluts love sucking a clean, circumcized penis. They think I am Rich Jewish-American, and that gives them a decadent thrill.
Wash the fromage from your schwantz, pierre. Maybe you will get head from your bitch too!