Minotaur Arcade Volume 1

Minotaur Arcade Volume 1
Developer: Llamasoft Publisher: Llamasoft Platform: Windows Released internationally: 2018 This game has a hidden developer message.

Minotaur Arcade Volume 1 is a compilation of two of Llamasoft's mobile games - an updated version of Gridrunner and a jaunty platformer called GoatUp - enhanced for desktop and VR platforms.

Developer Messages

The following appears in the latter part of the string table, at offset 0x001D4E40 in the executable. Some of this may appear in the ending of Polybius, another Llamasoft game.

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elberberries.
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy cow, who mooed.
My hovercraft is full of eels.
Chicken tikka vindaloo, three spicy poppadoms, pilau rice and a garlic naan.

This first batch can be easily recognised as mostly consisting of quotes from the Monty Python franchise (as an aside, the game's datafile's filename "001.larch" is also such a reference), with the exception of the last line - which, given this is Llamasoft we're discussing here, is most likely one of their usual orders at the various curry shops they haunt.

THE POLAR BEAR'S PARTY OR THE MANNERLESS MUSK OX
A hospitable polar bear resolved to give a party;
His nature was gregarious, his sentiments were hearty.
He asked the Walruses and Seals that lived upon the floe;
And in a burst of friendliness, the Musky Ox also.
The Musky Ox, he lives on land, but still he likes it cold;
His fur is thick, he's never sick, I think I'll be so bold!
"O Musky Ox, O Musky Box, your neighbor, Polar Bear,
Invites you to his party; he hopes you'll come; so there!"
A lovely feast of blubber strips he set before each guest,
A puffin pie, a stuffin' pie, and boobies of the best.
They drank I don't know what they drank but they were blithe and gay,
And still the more the viands shrank, the more they had to say.
All, all except the Musky Ox! He sat beside the board;
He did not eat, he did not drink, he did not speak a word.
"Speak up! Speak up! Thou Musky Ox, Why sit so dumb and still?
The rest are merry as you please, and eat and drink their fill!"
The Musk Ox raised his musky eyes and shook his musky head;
"I don't like blubber, you ursine lubber!" he very rudely said.
"Your puffin pie, your stuffin' pie, they fill me with disgust.
Bring me, old hoss, some Iceland moss! You will, you shall, you must!"
The Bear looked at the Walruses and they looked back at him,
They rose beside the festal board, and oh, their looks were grim.
"Go seek your Iceland moss yourself, you rude unmannered beast;
It will be long before you're asked to share a Polar feast!"
They seized upon that Musky Ox and drove him to the shore,
The bundled him, they trundled him, with loud and angry roar.
Now see him wallop o'er the snow, hungry and tired and cross,
For not within a hundred miles grew any Iceland moss.
While Bear and Walruses and Seals cry "Wherefore all this fuss?
E'en let him go, old double-toe! There's all the more for us!"

The poem is drawn from Tirra Lirra: Rhymes Old and New which itself collected poems from the 1909 St. Nicholas Magazine.

Clearly the intent of this cautionary tale is to depict the poor Musky Ox as the villain of the piece, a poor graceless beast who should have had better manners than so roughly to reject his ursine host's offer of food. And yet looking at it with modern and perhaps more civilised eyes we can argue that perhaps the Polar Bear ought to have had a little more consideration for the fact that his musky companion was a vegetarian. Finding himself with food he was unable to eat, and enduring a growing sense of hostility the longer that food was not consumed, it is perhaps unsurprising that the shy and somewht socially awkward ox might blurt out a reply intended to be jocular but instead interpreted as unmannerly by his hosts. For a beast already quite unused to socialising and parties (to which he is seldom invited, perhaps on account of his muskiness) it must have been quite a traumatic experience to be thus ejected and let far from home and food and forced to wallop home alone and hungry.

A critique of the above poem.

SEARCHING FOR BASINGSTOKE. UNABLE TO LOCATE BASINGSTOKE.
You really ought to try the hottest curry in the entire curry house. Have a phal. You only live once.
Come rain or shine we'd always make time for curry night.
SCENETABLE EXCEEDED. BEGIN EXCEPTION PROTOCOL OVERRIDE. CONTACTING AGENCIES. DONE INFORMING ILLUMINATI DONE MJ-12 TRANSMISSION RUNNING ERROR Giraffes Cups of tea. Enthusiastic sandwiches.

A bit more curry discussion, mixed in with some weird faux(?)-error messages referencing old conspiracy theories and a dreary English town that Llamasoft has an inexplicable love of making fun of.

ATN ATN OSCR XRAY 6502 MESSAGE BEGINS PRIORITY ULTRA
The aliens, it seems, had been studying us for some millennia. They were particularly fascinated by, and attracted to, our cattle. This may seem a little unlikely, given their rather well-documented predilection for abducting and mutilating Earthly beasts, but so it seemed to be in their bovine-besotted alien mind-constructs. Thus when the time came to invade, their use of bioenhanced hyperbovids was perhaps reasonable fo rthem. They saw themselves as liberators, sent to free the bovine masses from the yoke of the predator-monkeys. This scenario is not unlike what happened in the Mutant Camel Wars, and if we can once more utilise the telepathic metagoat flock perhaps we can achieve a similar remote deprogramming of the enslaved cattle.

An unexpected bout of lore. References are made to Llamasoft's Attack of the Mutant Camels series.

If you have sat through all this, well done. I should have been in the dentists right now but instead I am sitting here as the car went a bit peculiar on the way and I deemed it prudent not to carry on, as it's rubbish weather and I didn't want to be stuck in the middle of Wales with a non functional car. It is doubly annoying as I have a knackered molar at the back I'd rather like seen to. Oh well. We hope you have enjoyed playing through the game and will keep an eye out for our future releases. Oh god, I misread the headline and thought it said "Tea with an ox can be a good thing." Anyway I doubt anyone will actually bother to decode this. $)$F3</quote>

A bit of friendly venting, presumably from Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter in one of his more bored moments.