Jeff Minter

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Jeff Minter at Assembly 2004

Jeff "Yak" Minter (born April 22, 1962 in Reading ) is a computer game developer from England who founded Llamasoft in 1982 and developed a variety of games for VC-20 , C-64 , Amiga , Atari ST and Atari Jaguar .

From 1982 to 1987 he was one of the most colorful people in the emerging computer game industry, probably also because camels and llamas kept appearing in his games .

Computer games

In 1981 Jeff Minter began writing games for the Sinclair ZX80 , which he also sold. In 1982 he then founded the software company Llamasoft. The first game he sold under this brand was Andes Attack (US version: Aggressor ), a Defender copy for the VC20 . Instead of the spaceships at Defender , there were little llamas in the game. Minter wrote his second game, Gridrunner , in just a week and became his first major success in England and the USA .

Minter then wrote a number of classic computer games, all of which he developed in assembly language . He wrote these games mainly for the then successful home computers C-64 , Atari 400 , Atari 800 and Atari ST . He sold the games mainly through word of mouth and through advertisements in the most popular computer game magazines .

After the collapse of the home computer market, Minter worked for Atari and VM Labs . For Atari he wrote Tempest 2000 (1994) on the Atari Jaguar , a remake of the Dave Theurer classic Tempest from 1981; Minter developed software for the Nuon Chip for VM Labs - including Tempest 3000. The Nuon chip is used in Samsung DVD players - Nuon games can also be played there.

At the time, Minter released three other games: Deflex , Hover Bovver (remakes of his own game from the 80s under the same name), and the PC / Macintosh game Gridrunner ++, an expansion of the Gridrunner game from the 80s.

In 2002 Minter began work on a project for the Nintendo GameCube . The project was called Unity . It was a combination of two topics that had occupied Minter for two decades: light synthesizers and computer games. Jeff Minter wrote the game for Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios , but the project ended prematurely in December 2004.

Parts of the program were rearranged and expanded and found in the new Microsoft Xbox 360 use (as a light synthesizer while playing music on the Xbox 360). A version of the light synthesizer under the name "Neon" is also planned for the PC. When neon appears on the PC is unclear.

On August 22, 2007, Jeff Minter released his long-awaited game Space Giraffe for the Xbox360 via Xbox Live Arcade . The game, which is strongly reminiscent of Tempest , costs 400 Microsoft Points (around US $ 5). The reviews were divided into two camps, either hated or loved the game, which was visually and acoustically designed in the usual Jeff Minter psychedelic style. It received only 2 points (out of 10 possible points) from the official Xbox360 magazine, from IGN 4.7 and from TeamXbox 4.3, while Game Almighty received a rating of 8.5, Games Asylum and Wired Game 8 and Game Industry News even 9 points (converted, original 4.5 of 5) awarded. The game only sold 10,000 times in the first two weeks, which angered Jeff Minter.

Minter is currently developing games for iPhone and iPad.

Most famous title in Germany

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ [1]
personal data
SURNAME Minter, Jeff
ALTERNATIVE NAMES yak
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English computer game developer and founder of Llamasoft
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Reading