Who is Jeff Minter? Unless you're a long-lasting fan of his work, you may have asked that upon becoming aware of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, the most recent interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse (following on from The Making Of Karateka and Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration). You may have heard Minter's name in connection with the remake of the unreleased Atari arcade video game Akka Arrh in 2023. Perhaps you played his mind-warping shooter Polybius in VR. You may keep in mind as far back as the Atari Jaguar and Minter's sensational Tempest 2000, the unanticipated emphasize of the console's library. Or possibly you remember his work from the 8-bit splendor days. You might feel in one's bones him from the day-to-day videos of him feeding his sheep on YouTube.
The point is that Jeff Minter has actually been making video games for an extremely long time– more than 40 years. And in all that time, he has actually remained real to what he thinks in. “One of the important things we state in the video game itself is the concept of him being the last indie designer,” states Chris Kohler, editorial director at Digital Eclipse in California. “The last of individuals from the early 80s who extremely purposely never ever offered out, never ever took the cash, never ever aimed to broaden or do anything besides [be] simply Jeff at his computer system, making the sorts of computer game that he wishes to make.”
“There's really couple of stories like that, there's extremely couple of individuals like that, who have actually been doing that for 40 years,” he continues. “I'm having a hard time to think about another one. There are individuals who are still in video games, however they advance up the supervisory ladder, or they open a studio, or they wind up doing something else. Simply to have someone that began in 1980 simply sitting there setting video games, and who's now still being in front of his computer system shows video games, it's an extremely, really special circumstance.”
Image credit: Digital Eclipse
The very first Jeff Minter joint I played was Llamatron: 2112, an early 90s homage to Robotron: 2084. It reimagined the traditional twin-stick shooter as an entirely wild trip that saw you blasting toilets and telephones while saving camels and wildebeest, soundtracked by a cacophony of bleating and odd electronic sounds. It blew my teenage mind that you might make a computer game so exceptionally weird therefore totally unlike definitely whatever else. Kohler's intro to the Minterverse came a couple of years later on. “The very first I truly became aware of him was when Tempest 2000 came out for the Atari Jaguar,” he states. “And everyone resembled, ‘Oh, well, you understand, Jeff Minter made it, he's this sort of god of shooter video games in Britain'. There wasn't an entire lot of chance for me to play a lot of those video games, due to the fact that a lot of them were just dispersed by Jeff himself, often actually making copies of cassettes and mailing them out to individuals in the UK.”
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story lastly offers everybody the possibility to play through Minter's back brochure,
