In a sixth-form college in Basingstoke, a maths and physics student who is really extraordinarily fond of llamas but keeps it pretty much to himself inadvertantly wanders into the wrong room. There's this weird machine in there with a little tiny keyboard and what looks like a TV bolted on the top. It's called a PET but it's not even remotely furry. There's a guy sat in front of it and he appears to be playing a crude video game.
The student asks the guy "Hey, where'd that game come from?"
The guy replies, "Oh, I typed it in".
The student's life changes forever.
The first product of Llamasoft is an admittedly crude version of the game 'Defender', coded for the Vic-20 home computer. Instead of Humanoids, the player defends tiny llamas, and so the game is named Andes Attack, so as to be geographically correct. The embryonic company places small adverts in the classified sections of the computer magazines of the day and in due course sells a correspondingly small quantity of the games. They hire a small trestle table at a Commodore computer show in London and the Yak duly appears on the first Thursday of the show, armed with a beat-up Vic-20 in a large metal Welsh expansion rack, a crappy portable colour TV, and 100 copies of the game. He loads up the Vic, plugs in a joystick and wonders if he'll sell any games.
Some things happen which surprise the Yak, displacing the usual obsessive visions of fluffy llamas and goats which usually occupy his cranium:
- all the games get sold on the first day
- an American gentleman in a suit is polite to him and wants to sell the game in the USA.
In due course the game is transferred to ROM and released by the American gentleman's company, Human Engineered Software, under the title Aggressor. The llamas, sadly, are removed. The game sells a bit, but doesn't do spectacularly well. Yak is grateful of a bit of income, though, and codes up a few more games. Now Llamasoft can afford larger adverts and are starting to sell more games in the UK. Yak writes one game in only a week - started on a Monday morning, finished by the following Sunday afternoon in time for Yak to relax and watch 'Battlestar Galactica'. The guys down the computer club seem to quite like it. It's a bit like Centipede but more hard-edged. Yak sends it to HES in the US.
It is time for the Yak to be surprised again.
Imagine, if it does not cause you to feel nauseous, a sleeping Yak, twitching gently, perhaps, as REM-sleep brings him fevered visions of uncharacteristically friendly artiodactyls. The phone rings at 4AM and, trailing dissipating visions of camelids, the Yak shambles out to answer the call. He is a little upset, as he's the kind of beast who likes to lleap out of bed at the crack of noon. On the other end, a little blurred by satellite delay, an American voice rants about some game that they've been playing for eight hours solid. The voice informs the Yak that he should expect significant monetary input. Bemused, the Yak makes a few notes on the pad by the phone and returns to his pit. Waking later, at a time closer to his usual emergence, the Yak makes himself a really strong cup of tea and remembers some weird dream, something about the game... goes to the phone, finds the note, and is intrigued.
The game gets to the top of the US software charts. The Yak is surprised. The Yak receives, in due course, significant monetary input. The Yak is taxed heavily by the Inland Revenue. The Yak writes some more games and, knackered, buggers off to Peru to rest and be with llamas.
Yak, however, doesn't mind. The UK computer market is booming, and Llamasoft are aquiring a reputation for unusual games, always with beastie themes; gameplayers are divided, some of them plain don't like the strange games emerging for the Commodore 64, games with names like Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Sheep in Space. Some players, however, enjoy the games very much, and they form a hardcore band of lloyal Llamasoft gamesplayers. Llamasoft develops a kind of cult following, and Yak is having tremendous fun. He begins to experiment with an idea called the Light Synthesiser and is frequently to be seen at London computer shows, blasting out the Floyd, generating interactive light displays on a giant projection screen, surrounded by eight or nine Commodores, upon which the llatest Llamasoft game sells itself to the converted. It is at this time that Yak starts to produce an occasional newsletter, The Nature of the Beast, in which he informs the Llamasofties of what new games he's making, what cool new games *other* people have made, cool things he's seen and cool albums he's heard, and, well, just rambles on in a vaguely informative way. The climax of that period is when Yak, for the release of a new light synthesiser, hires the London Planetarium for a party. Video and laser graphics are deployed together. The partygoers have an extremely good time, so good, in fact, that the Yak is banned from ever hiring the place again on account of overenthusiastic partygoers smoking bush in the bog. Yak is very happy. Yak goes skiing.
This is, of course, too good to last.
Llamasoft tries something new: rather than sell the Yak's output directly they sell the games to another firm to market. That firm is Atari UK. Yak does a couple of games for them, but the sales are not enough to prevent the steady erosion of the resources acquired during the Golden Years. The Yak begins to be worried. The Yak is losing it.
Seeking a new direction, and inspired by the success of the new game consoles like the Sega Master System and the NES, the Yak is interested in getting in on the ground floor of a new, state-of-the-art game system. A Welsh company called Konix is developing a new game console, based on a revolutionary design by a bunch of Cambridge designers known as Flare. The Yak develops a game, Attack of the Mutant Camels '89, for the system, investing seven months and five grand. Konix run out of money, and the system crashes and burns before it gets to market.
The Yak is annoyed.
Atari UK announce that they will be producing an advanced game console, named the Panther, based on a revolutionary design by a bunch of Cambridge designers known as Flare ][. The Yak begins to develop a game. After two months something happens inside Atari and the Panther is discontinued.
The Yak is annoyed and skint.
The Yak is surprised.
The game does extremely well. Atari ST owners pay up in droves, and although the monetary input is insignificant compared to the Vic-20 days, it is sufficient to keep the corporate camelid head of Llamasoft above water, and ensure that Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World does not run short of digestive biscuits. The Yak settles down to write more shareware, drinks a large amount of tea, scratches Flossie the Prettiest Sheep in the World in exactly the right place, and in due course is approached by Atari, US this time, to develop a game for their new 68030 computer, the Atari Falcon. Llamasoft are allowed to develop an extremely llama-oriented game called Llamazap, full of camels, sheep, cows, goats and - of course - llamas. The Yak enjoys working with Atari, and that they gave him the freedom to write a game in his own style. And then, one day, the Yak hears about a radical new system that Atari are producing, designed by a bunch of Cambridge engineers called Flare ][. Apparently this system is the reason Panther was axed, and it's orders of magnitude better. In due course the Yak is sitting in front of a prototype system in Sunnyvale.
The Yak writes an image warper.
The Yak puts it in a realtime loop, to see how fast it will go.
The Yak is surprised.
The Yak is in *love*.
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