STUDIO PROFILE

A trip to the farm to meet with one of the hardiest names in videogames

By Paul Drury

Founded 1982

Employees 2

Key staff Jeff Minter (head director), Ivan Zorzin (technical director)

URL minotaurproject.co.uk

Selected softography Gridrunner, Revenge Of The Mutant Camels, Sheep In Space, Llamatron, Tempest 2000, Space Giraffe, Polybius, Akka Arrh

Current projects Soon-to-be-announced Atari coin-op remake

All studios have their own daily routine, a particular approach to the demands of game development, but not all have animal husbandry as an integral part of it. “Most days are pretty much the same,” explains Jeff Minter, who began Llamasoft in 1982 at the family home in Tadley, Hampshire, before relocating to Wales in 1987. “Get up, have a cup of tea, go out and give the sheep their morning biscuits and cuddles. They need cuddles every morning. Then back in here, I’m on my machine, Giles is on his, and we do our thing – which is essentially sitting down in front of a compiler and swearing. Since he’s been here, I’ve become very proficient in Italian swearing.”

“Our development process relies on a lot of tea, tears, swear words, sheep, curry,” adds Ivan Zorzin, better known by his online forum nickname, Giles the billy goat, who stresses the importance of that final comma. The pair share their home-cum-development-studio, a remote farmhouse near Carmarthen, with Lucky, Brambles, Skippy and Panda, four rams saved “from the bad place”, a phrase both Minter and Zorzin only ever whisper, along with Maya the llama and Autumn the donkey.

To mark Edge’s 30th anniversary, it felt like a good idea to focus on a studio that has been making games throughout the magazine’s lifespan to date – which immediately reduced our options considerably. What makes Llamasoft even more remarkable is not only that it has survived for over four decades when so many of its peers from the ’80s have either gone out of business or been consumed by larger entities, but that it has remained broadly unchanged, with Minter at the helm, making the kind of games he wants to play, paying little attention to the fads and fashions of the broader videogame industry. “In a way, I’ve been fortunate because the kind of things I do in terms of design are arcade games, and there are not a lot of those being made these days,” Minter says in scrutinising Llamasoft’s longevity. “That lets me carry on doing the stuff I like to do and hopefully am quite good at. We’ve never strayed from the path. Stubbornness helps, too. We’ve kept on doing what we want to do and somehow found a way to keep doing it.”

Sticking to their guns – and indeed blasting as a general concept – is invariably a key element of a Llamasoft release, and it may well be a key factor in the company’s long life, but what has changed over their 41 years is the ‘I’ becoming a ‘we’. Zorzin first came into contact with Minter in 2002, through the unlikely catalyst of Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove, which has a llama as a central plot point. “It was a tough time in my life and I was feeling depressed,” says Zorzin, who was living in his home town of Monfalcone, Italy, at the time. “I really liked that movie so I did a random Google search for llamas and came across Jeff’s site. I sent him a short email… and heard nothing.”