Llamatron - Amiga - Llamasoft
Amiga Llamatron by Llamasoft
With the 8-bit home computer market declining due to the arrival of a new breed of powerful 16-bit machines. It was time for Jeff Minter and Llamasoft to move on and initially this would be the Atari ST, followed by the Amiga.

A number of games in the Llamasoft catalogue were ported over to the 16-bits, including Revenge of the Mutant Camels and a version of Gridder, titled Super Gridder.

One of the new games to appear was Llamatron (Jeff's version of the coin-op Robotron). This featured the obligatory Llama as the main character and everything moved at a frenetic pace,  with the simple objective to shoot anything in sight. Graphically nothing special, but the sound was neat, with amusing sound effects and of course great fun to play.

With Atari looking to build on their initial success with the ST, they went on to release the Atari Falcon, a 32-bit machine. Unfortunately for Atari it was commercially short lived. The Amiga had become dominant, but that didn't stop Jeff from releasing two games for the Falcon format, unsurprisingly one called Llamazap! and the other Defender 2000.

Atari Jaguar
Atari Jaguar by Atari Inc.
 Tempest 2000 - Llamasoft
Tempest 2000 by Llamasoft

Jeff was also involved in helping to promote Atari's new Jaguar games console, with a version of the coin-op Tempest 2000. A wonderful game, graphically effective and with great gameplay. However, Atari would suffer another blow, as their Jaguar was destined for the scrap heap, with the arrival of the Sony Playstation.


Tempest 2000 Video Clip from YouTube (deanpook)

In later years Llamasoft would release new versions of games from its back catalogue - Gridrunner++ for Xbox, PC, Mac and Hover Bovver 2 for the Pocket PC.