Llamasoft, the First Indie (Kinda)

I've spent the last few nights playing through "Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story" by Digital Eclipse, the same folks who brought us the Making of Karateka and the amazing Atari 50 collection.

Let me sum up -- Llamasoft was a tiny indie game company releasing Commodre 64, VIC-20, Atari ST and other 80s microcomputer games in the United Kingdom back in the day. It was pretty much just one dude, Jeff Minter, and he was very much a random weirdo who made arcade-style games because he liked arcade-style games, stuck llamas and camels and other "beasties" into them just because he liked the aesthetic, built up a cult following of fans, sold his games on audio tapes for a few quid a pop at small retail stores, and even ran a pseudo-blog via a postal mailing list where he'd jot down his thoughts about games, the industry, his work, travel to Peru, psychedlia, and whatever else came to mind. ...that was a massive run-on sentence but the man WAS a run-on sentence personified.

What's fascinating to me about Llamasoft is how it's a fine parallel to the indie game scene of today -- struggling to stay relevant by going viral and building passionate small fanbases, dealing with large publishers crowding them out of the market, trying to be a distinctive voice that represents who you are. Like, look at this excerpt from his newsletter released in the mid-80s:

I can't transcribe it all in alt text but in short, he's lamenting the transition away from independent solo devs and into the system of publishers and development houses we're dealing with today -- the focus on profit and commercialization and commoditization.

Hell, he even had a time when he had a heart condition that kept him down for the count, and making games was the one thing he could do to keep his mental health going. If that doesn't resonate with me personally, nothing will.

What's more, after a few bad investments (in a console that never ended up releasing, and a small run of flops) he even decided to go the radical route of releasing his games for free as shareware / donationware... just like I'm doing. I'm following the same arc in so many ways.

History moves in cycles, and seeing the same industry-wide problems that led to the crash of the 80s echoed today is weirdly resonant. I highly recommend picking up the Llamasoft compilation if you have the dough, as a fascinating look into a local gaming scene you may not be familiar with, yet with be very familiar with indeed.