Hover Bovver History
Ah, I have very fond memories of this game; there will always
be a particularly soft spot in my beasty heart for Hover Bovver. In many
ways it is atypical of the Llamasoft style of gameplay (which usually involved
the player, represented on the screen incarnate as some beast or other, firing
at a load of objects whose very mundaneness, set in the context of a videogame,
served to lend the game a surreal aspect).
In Hover Bovver there was no shooting, and nobody got hurt (or
not really hurt; there was comedy violence, in that the player got to
set the dog on his neighbour, but the game was more slapstick than nightstick);
and the subject of the gameplay couldn't have been more mundane - mowing the
lawn. The pace of the gameplay was gentle; there were ample opportunities for
the player to just park the mower and consider his next move. Above all, the
game was humorous. People would laugh out loud at the sight of the silly Dog
chasing the Neighbour whilst emitting a stream of synthetic barks and whines,
whilst the hero-protagonist, Gordon Bennett, struggled to push the mower round
without getting caught or damaging the flowerbeds. It was a gentle pisstake
of an English suburban ritual, played to the accompaniment of a jolly interpretation
of English Country Garden tinkling away on the SID chip.
One of the reasons that I am so fond of the game, and certainly
one of the main reasons that it came out as wonderfully different and humorous
as it did, is that it was not entirely my design. In fact it was a collaborative
design between me and my father, who was deeply involved and enthused with all
matters Llamasoft and a keen videogame player himself.
The occasion of the design of Hover Bovver is a memorable
one for me, because it was during a particularly happy period in the history
of Llamasoft. The early part of 1983 found us doing rather well, more so than
I could possibly have imagined when Llamasoft started up in 1982. It was a busy
time, with me producing games on the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64 as fast as
I could make them, and every now and again we would all have to go off to some
computer show in London or occasionally Birmingham and show off the games. Those
exhibitions were always simultaneously exhausting (setting up and tearing down
was quite a lot of work, as was simply being on your feet all day demonstrating,
selling, or hanging out and playing games with the customers, as I did) and
a hell of a lot of fun (it was great to meet the people who were so fond of
the games, and I get to meet a lot of good people that way, and I got to drink
a lot of beer, too).
Upon this occasion we had to go to a show in Birmingham, and
we stayed in a village a few miles out of town, driving in to the exhibition
each morning. The place where we stayed was really rather lovely - what had
been a rather posh manor-house was now being used as a bed and breakfast place,
but the owners still lived there and it felt like one was living in a
posh house, rather than just being a guest there. They made us feel very welcome
and as if we belonged there, somehow. It was a good place.
Anyway, one morning we were up and eating a very hearty cooked
breakfast; another excellent aspect of the place, the food was delicious, and
on that morning I was enjoying great piles of scrambled eggs on toast washed
down with lashings of tea ;-). It was a pleasant morning outside, and the grounds
of the house were rather delightful, formal gardens. Glancing out of the window
and seeing a gardener going about his duties maintaining the lawns, I turned
to my dad and uttered the fateful words:
"You know, I bet you could do a game about mowing the lawn..."
which, on the face of it, might sound like a recipe for boredom
of the highest order. However, my dad could see where I was going with it, and
we started to toss ideas back and forth:
"...you could steal the neighbour's mower..."
"...he'd be chasing after you while you tried to cut the
grass..."
"...you could have a pet dog, it could get in the way..."
"...but you could set it on the neighbour..."
"...you'd have to be careful not to trash the flowerbeds..."
"...or an angry gardener would be after you as well..."
and in the space of five minutes, we pretty much had the core
design of Hover Bovver thrashed out between us, and were already chuckling
to ourselves about how funny it might be both to play and to watch.
All that remained was for us to come up with a name for our potential
game, and during the drive into Birmingham that morning I remembered (or subsequently
found out that I mis-remembered) the tagline to an advertising campaign that
was running between rival lawnmower manufacturers: "It's a lot less bovver
with a hover". The phrase "Hover Bovver" popped into my mind,
I immediately exclaimed it to my dad, and it was just obvious and right that
we should call our game by that name :-).
Of course, it still remained for me to implement the game, but
that wasn't too difficult; it took me about a month all told, if I remember
correctly. We thought the game should have an appropriate musical accompaniment,
and so I called upon my good friend James Lisney, a professional musician of
some repute, to produce a suitable arrangement of "English
Country Garden" to accompany the action. The music was playful
and light-hearted, just like the game it was designed to embellish.
The title screen was cute in its own right, opening with Gordon
Bennett pushing the mower across the screen, cutting the grass and revealing
the game's title.
Then, in a sequence inspired probably more by the cut scenes
in Pac-Man than anything else, a charming little act plays out between a llama,
who enters stage left and stands over the "LLAMA" in "LLAMASOFT",
and Gordon, who comes on from the right. They meet in the middle, and fall in
love...
...before strolling off the screen arm-in-arm... erm, well, llamas
have no arms, so that's not possible. But Gordon has his arm around the
llama, anyway.
Upon starting the game, Gordon would be seen ambling around to
his neighbour's house, there to purloin the coveted Flymo from the garage.
There were three Neighbours - Jim, Tom and Alf, all chosen because
they seemed like good honest English suburban names, and they all fit into three
characters ;-). Upon getting the mower from the garage the action shifted to
the main game screen.
The main game screen is recognisable as a game of Hover Bovver
to anyone who has seen the modern version, even if it is a bit more constrained
due to the limitations of the hardware of the day. Gordon wears a yellow hat
in this version, and is to be seen pushing the Flymo through the flowerbeds
at the top-right of the screen. The irate Gardener is trapped in the middle
section of the lawn and the Neighbour in the left-hand section; Gordon's only
threat is the Dog, which is about to run out of Dog Tolerance and has its head
partly offscreen in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
The game was finished just prior to a big game show in London,
and we thought, given the nature of the game and the fact that it employed a
hover mower as one of its major themes, that maybe Flymo might be interested
in getting involved. Not in any financial way - just that maybe they might let
us call the mower in the game a Flymo, and maybe just say that the game was
approved by Flymo or something :-). Just for a bit of fun :-).
To our delight they agreed, and duly provided us with a shiny
new orange Flymo to display on our stand when we went to the upcoming London
exhibition. This was all fine and funky, and I duly added references to Flymo
by name throughout the game.
Then, just a few days before we were to launch the game at the
London show, something odd happened inside Flymo. I'm still not sure what it
was, whether some marketing personnel changed or whether they just got cold
feet, but they changed their minds about being associated with our game, and
required me to go back and change all the references to "Flymo" to
something else, which is why if you look at those old games you'll see the mower
referred to throughout as an "Airmo" :-].
We did end up keeping the free Flymo, though, and my brother
used it for many years to tonsure the herbiage of his own little corner of suburbia
:-). Not sure if any of his neighbours ever pinched it though ;-).
You can download the Commodore version of Hover Bovver for use
with an emulator - here's the VICE
snapshot image, and here is a more general .D64
image that should work with just about any Commodore 64 emulator.
The dog in original Hover Bovver was based upon my mother's Afghan
hound, a rather splendidly striking and hairy beast with a very good-hearted
and soppy nature and lamentably little brain. I used to joke, perhaps unkindly,
that the dog-algorithm in the game exhibited more evidence of sentience than
the real-life dog which inspired it. In modern Hover Bovver the dog is based
upon my own rather dotty Border Collie called Vindy (full name Vindy Lou, named
after my favourite curry, y'see) and it has taxed my abilities in the field
of Artificial Stupidity to get the dog to behave in a manner even a tenth as
bonkers as the real thing.
Anyway, back to the history. We went to the show in London with
our display Flymo and some fake grass and a giant sheep and Hover Bovver,
and found that the game was quite well received. It seemed to appeal to all
kinds of people who wouldn't normally play Llamasoft games, and in particular
it seemed to appeal equally to both males and females - very unusual in games
of that era, and I think only Pac-Man had evoked a similarly egalitarian
response at that time.
We also found out that spending five days in a hot and crowded
exhibition space with the same tune playing again and again and again will send
you absolutely stark raving hatstand, no matter how good the tune is.
On the last day my mum went down with a nuclear-grade vomit-inducing migraine,
and she doesn't usually even get migraines. I believe it was shortly
after this that we started our policy of just taking a stereo with us and playing
Pink Floyd and lots of nice, real music and just keeping the in-game music pretty
muted at shows. Our stand therefore became known as a haven of sanity (and decent
tunes) in an environment otherwise entirely filled with tinny jangling syntho-ditties
and shrieking sound effects. But I digress.
The response to Hover Bovver was sufficiently good that we commissioned
a friend of mine, Aaron Liddiment, to take the Commodore code and convert it
to run on the 8-bit Atari machines.
There were some slight graphical differences between the two
versions, due mainly to the fact that the Atari didn't have quite such good
sprites as the Commodore, and therefore the dog looks a bit more like a squashed
asterisk than it does in the Commodore version, and the Gardener and Neighbour
look like angry Space Invaders, but the gameplay was identical.
You can download an .ATR
disk image of Hover Bovver for Atari 8-bit emulators here. I use the rather
excellent Atari800Win emulator myself.
As I mentioned at the start of this article, I have always had
a soft spot for Hover Bovver over the years; and, indeed, my father and
I occasionally discussed ideas for a possible sequel, many of which have finally
come to light now that the PocketPC version of the game is finally complete.
I do regret that I never got around to implementing this fun and amusing game
on any other systems though - it would have been quite possible to produce excellent
Amiga and Atari ST versions of the game, incorporating the new bits that my
dad and I discussed. Amd I always thought that Hover Bovver would have made
an excellent pub video game - you know, for playing on those videogame-tables
that you now lamentably never see in pubs any more; the gentle pace of the game
seemed somehow to be suited to pub gameplay, to an amiable game of doubles between
mates enjoying a pint.
Hover Bovver has almost been resurrected a couple of times
before. Towards the end of my stay in the US, a chap who had written an excellent
Intellivision emulator offered to let me have a play with that and an Intellivision
assembler and debugger he'd made, and, since I have long been a fan of the Intellivision,
I thought it might be fun to do an Inty version. Hover Bovver would have
been well within the scope of that machine, and I got as far as getting a few
flowerbeds up on the screen and a couple of moving characters. Unfortunately
I then got caught up in the process of moving back to Wales, and I never restarted
work on Intellivision Hover Bovver.
Oh well, maybe one day ;-)...
The other time was back in 1999, shortly after the colour Game
Boy came out - when I first saw the CGB I immediately thought again of Hover
Bovver; again, the pace and style of gameplay seemed just nicely suited
to a handheld device (which is why it's now on the PocketPC, I suppose!). So
I downloaded some tools, and basically just sat there one weekend and came up
with this much of it:
...a disembodied Flymo that moves (and mows) around a scrolling
lawn; but again, I never found the time to persevere with that version, and
although I still have the source code, I doubt if it will get finished.
'Course, if I were commissioned to do a GBA version of HB2, now
that would be a different matter ;-).
You can take a look at the CGB version, if you're curious. Here's
a .GBC file that should work on your favourite
CGB emulator - and I know for a fact that it will work on an actual Colour Game
Boy, because I've burned a cart myself and tried it ;-).
In fact, that CGB version probably was one of the contributing
factors to making me choose Hover Bovver as one of the first nuLlamasoft
games. I'd showed it to them down the pub,
and although they'd never played a full version, when I showed them the demo,
and described the game, they were quite amused and taken with the idea; and
periodically since then I'd be asked when I was going to do anything about "that
lawnmower game".
I'm really happy to have finally brought it back :-). I regret
that it's too late for my dad to have seen our sequel to the original game,
but I'm certain he'd have loved it and got a laugh out of playing it just as
I have :-). And somehow it feels good to me that even though he's been gone
a few years now, some of his ideas are in this new version of a game that we
both loved :-).
Finally, and for no apparent reason, here are some rotating cows.
