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The Konix Multi-system Games
Here are the know games that were either in development for the Konix Multi-system or had been planed to be. Some have screen shots from magazines and some have videos provided with kind permission of Jon Dean (the guy that actually filmed them). Please don't distribute or re-produce these videos as they remain Jon Dean's Copyright.
Attack of the Mutant Camels 1989
Box art — Steinar Lund
(click for his site)
The only Konix Multi-system game that was to be commercially released that exists today as playable code. Every other title on this site is a press release, a screenshot, a recollection, a demo, a rumour or we can't release it for legal reasons. Attack of the Mutant Camels ’89 — Jeff Minter’s rebuild of his own 1983 classic for the machine he was enthused about — survived on a disk, has been preserved, and can be downloaded and played in the Slipstream emulator right now. It is the single closest thing we have to actually using the hardware Konix were trying to ship.
At a glance
The game that pushed the machine
Of everything we saw running on the Konix Multi-system, AMC’89 pushed it the hardest. Large colourful sprites thrown around the screen, loud shoot-’em-up sound effects layered over Jeff’s trademark algorithmically-generated music — this was the title that demonstrated what the hardware was actually for. The original 8-bit AMC was a Defender variant; the Konix version was something more ambitious, with a considerable facelift over its earlier incarnations.
Although it didn’t use the car / bike / plane physical controls the Slipstream architecture was designed around, it confirmed something important: the machine was perfectly capable of arcade-quality graphics in the home. Which was, after all, the entire pitch.
Compared to the 16-bit competition, the Multi-system version’s graphics could only be described as luscious. Strong vibrant colours washed across the screen. It looked engrossing in a way the plainer Atari ST and Amiga versions just didn’t. It looked like Jeff had found a machine he could properly have fun with. He’s on record as finding the 8086 CPU an annoyance compared to the 68000 he was used to — but if it was an annoyance, he overcame it without trouble.
Testimony · Jon Dean
Mutant Camels would have been a killer app, because it was so fast, so colourful and so loud. I can show video of the game even today and people want to play it. Jeff could always write very playable and great looking games.
Jon Dean — on the Konix version of AMC’89Jeff Minter’s flavour
You can usually tell a Jeff Minter game within thirty seconds of starting it. The Konix AMC announces itself in the form of in-game captions that fire off as you play. One of them is the line below.
“My nipples explode with delight.”
One of several appearing at random during play. Unmistakably Jeff Minter.Jeff didn’t write generic arcade games; he wrote games that had a personality, often funnier than they had any right to be, frequently surreal, occasionally bordering on the deranged. AMC fits comfortably under the ‘Defender clone’ banner, but as so often with Jeff’s work, the end result tends to surpass the genre it’s referencing. The whole is greater than the sum of the programming.
Jeff also seems particularly pleased with the computer-generated music routines in this version — and rightly so. The whole package would have turned heads. If this had been running on a demo unit in a shop, people couldn’t have helped but notice it. It might well have made the machine fly off the shelves, and made Jeff and everyone involved quite wealthy in the process — which, again, was rather the point.
For more on what Jeff was actually up to at the time of developing AMC’89, drawn from his Llamasoft company newsletter, see the dedicated Jeff page. It’s a fascinating read — though it is a long one.
Jeff and the Power Chair
Jeff Minter · Power Chair · AMC’89
There exists a photograph of Jeff Minter astride the Konix Power Chair, holding the recoiling light gun, ostensibly playing his own game on the machine he’d written it for. It is, possibly, the single most evocative image in the entire Konix archive: the Llamasoft head sat in the company’s most ambitious peripheral, demonstrating its most accomplished software.
The light gun was almost certainly never part of AMC’89’s actual play mechanic — manoeuvring a Defender-style ship with both hands wrapped around a chunky plastic gun would have been somewhere between awkward and impossible. The shot is a promotional one. But it’s a glorious promotional shot, and it captures the spirit of the Konix project better than any spec sheet ever could.
Gameplay footage
Three videos of the actual Konix version running, courtesy of JP Dean.
Gameplay · AMC’89 on the Multi-system
Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Video content © 2004, JP Dean. May not be used or reproduced without prior written permission.
Jeff Minter on the death of the machine, 1995
Six years after the Konix project collapsed and the Multi-system version of AMC sat unfinished on Jeff’s shelf, he posted the following on an internet forum — I can't remember the exact source.
Forum post · Jeff Minter · June 1995
Date: Thurs, Jun 8 1995 12:00 am
Unfortunately Konix ran out of dosh before they could bring the thang to market and it died a death — although I seem to recall a couple of years ago there was an attempt to revive it, with a 386 as the CPU. They even tried to get me to dig out the old code for AMC, but by then I was working on the Jaguar so I said no way.
Jeff Minter — Llamasoft · forum post, 8 June 1995The “attempt to revive it” Jeff refers to is almost certainly MSU — Multi-system UK — the successor company that picked up the Slipstream chipset and tried to put it into new products through the early-to-mid 1990s. Jeff’s 386 reference matches: by 1993–94 MSU were running the Slipstream alongside an Intel 80376 (a stripped-down 386 variant). The fact that they were trying to get the AMC code dug out is consistent with their effort to seed a software library for the platform.
Jeff on Llamasoft, in his own words
A clip from one of Jeff’s public talks on the history of Llamasoft, I've started the video playing at the section specifically about AMC’89, but you can - of course - watch the whole thing if you like.
Screenshots
Eight stills of the actual Multi-system version of AMC’89. Some are captured from the period VHS footage (hence the variable quality), some scanned from magazines of the time. Cleaner emulator captures will follow — once I can bring myself to stop playing the thing long enough to take them. They do show levels that we unfortunately don't have with the emulated code - but at least we have something.
AMC’89 · Multi-system version (period captures)
 "AMC'89 - Image 1")
 "AMC'89 - Image 2")
 "AMC'89 - Image 3")
 "AMC'89 - Image 4")
 "AMC'89 - Image 5")
 "AMC'89 - Image 6")
 "AMC'89 - Image 7")
 "AMC'89 - Image 8")
Compared with the Amiga competition
If the screenshots above leave you unconvinced, compare them with these two stills from the Amiga version of Revenge of the Mutant Camels (effectively the sequel) — running on hardware that vastly outsold the machine Jeff was writing AMC’89 for. Watch the videos above first, then make up your own mind.
Revenge of the Mutant Camels · Amiga (reference)
 "Amiga Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Image 1")
 "Amiga Revenge of the Mutant Camels - Image 2")
Note: these are Amiga images, included for visual comparison — the Konix screenshots above are the ones to judge AMC’89 on.
Credits & thanks: Box artwork by Steinar Lund, designed specifically for the Konix release. Gameplay videos © 2004, JP Dean — used here with thanks, may not be reproduced without prior written permission. Jeff Minter’s 1995 forum post is reproduced verbatim with the original date header preserved; the specific forum is no longer known. Llamasoft history lecture clip extracted and uploaded by a third party on YouTube. AMC’89 itself can be downloaded and played via the Slipstream emulator.