Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story review – 43 psychedelic games in a row

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is a fascinating “interactive documentary” from Digital Eclipse that has previously used the same format Atari 50, a 50th anniversary celebration of the legendary company’s early arcade and home games. How Atari 50, The Jeff Minter Story collects a wide range of playable, carefully emulated classic games and puts them into context using a wealth of background material: video clips, photos, artwork, documentaries and more, all presented via an interactive timeline. There is one big difference: everything is included The Jeff Minter Story is essentially the work of one man.

Jeff Minter is one of the most enduring and iconoclastic figures in indie game development, a lone gunman with an inimitable style who pursues his own agenda – a mix of classic arcade games, crazy psychedelia and animals to match Ungulate family – for over 40 years. The 61-year-old self-taught programmer and designer grew up in the early 80s homebrew computing scene in the UK and never left that way of working behind. Last year I had the pleasure of introducing Minter; He is a true character with a perspective that is both poignant and refreshing on almost the entire history of video game development.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is a great way to get to know Minter and learn more about his work. The documentary brings together 42 games from the early phase of his career between 1981 and 1994 as well as a modernized remaster by the Digital Eclipse team. Gridrunner Remastered. The best way to take it in is to explore the interactive timeline, watch the informative video clips – directed by Paul Docherty, who is currently producing a documentary about Minter – and occasionally delve into games in between.

However, I decided to play all 43 games back to back and in chronological order.

This is a very silly approach The Jeff Minter Story. It was frustrating, monotonous and overwhelming at times. The Minter games are going very hard: Brutal speed, challenging gameplay ideas, stunning graphics and unrestricted surrealism are the norm. Also, many of the early games are pretty rough. Still, my strange search shed light on both the astonishing scope of what Digital Eclipse has achieved with this package and the limitations that come with it.

It is an amazing experience to watch an artist take shape before your eyes in this way, as his interests and distinctive quirks gradually emerge and his design ideas are refined over time, gradually coalescing into a coherent whole. There are very few video game developers you could do that with, either because their work is more dispersed and collaborative or because their games aren’t as overwhelmingly immediate or as intensely personal.

It helps that Minter is—or was, early in his career—incredibly prolific, as well as a shoot-from-the-hip iterator who has no qualms about publicly elaborating on the weaknesses of his ideas. In fact, there are far fewer than 43 individual games here, as Digital Eclipse contains many of the ports that Minter and his friends created when they released copies of his hits on new systems. Rather than cheapening the package, these shed light on both the evolving technology and Minter’s way of working. It’s interesting to see how often ports of games for the Commodore VIC-20 computer look to its more powerful successor, the Commodore 64 more primitive, as Minter’s experience with the older system contrasts with his familiarity with the new system.

Many of his early games are straight-up copies of arcade classics like defender And centipede, with one or two of his own ideas inserted. (In fact, Minter’s unlicensed version of centipede (made for the incredibly primitive Sinclair ZX81 computer without having played the original.) Sometimes these insertions are character goofs, like replacing the AT-ATs in one Reich strikes back Play with camels Attack of the Mutant Camels. Sometimes these are diamond-hard nuggets of genius game designers, like the hardened knots that clog and block the playing field in its centipede-inspired classic from 1982, Gridrunner. Minter arguably anticipated today’s modding communities by turning his personal quirks into his favorite games.

It’s gratifying to see Minter’s personality shine through during games, too. First, it’s his way with words: “EXCESS BAT MISERY,” proclaims the simple bat-and-ball game Deflex V if you put too many clubs on the field. Then surreal visual accents appear, like a very Monty Python Hand of God, which tears the player off the screen in an almost unplayable way Rat man. Next comes stroboscopic visual effects, then the games become much faster and the sound becomes more intense. 1982s Andes attack begins a lifelong obsession by replacing the people in you defender Cloning with llamas. There is a satirical, provincial English tone like in the 1983s Headbanger heaven and lawnmower action game Hover Bovver.

Even better are the design ideas that Minter uses, devious in their simplicity, to mix up the mostly classic move-and-zap action. In the 1983s Laser zoneThe player simultaneously controls two turrets on the X and Y axes of the screen. The laser-spewing llamas of Metagalactic llama battle at the edge of time Your shots bounce off a force field that the player can raise or lower to control the rebound. The action in the 1984s Sheep in space hangs between gravitational fields that bend shots up or down.

The problem with this collection is its limited scope combined with Minter’s absurd early productivity. The first 31 games in the collection only cover the years 1981 to 1984; There are 12 games from 1983 alone. There’s a heavy emphasis on titles that are academically interesting but can be excruciating to play. From 1984 onwards the narrative shifts. Minter began a highly experimental phase that yielded some bizarre results, such as putting together mini-games Batalykha typically strange and unforgiving flirtation with non-linear action-adventure called Ancipitaland the completely confusing Mama llama. It also brought with it a kind of enlightenment Psychedelic, a beautiful, beautifully coded light synthesizer for the C64 that started a lifelong love affair with light synthesizers and music visualizers. (It’s telling that Minter spent, on average, much more time programming his lightweight synthesizers than his games.)

Then, after a great run of sophisticated and technically brilliant shooters for the C64 in 1986-7 (Rainbow Alpha, Revenge of the Mutant Camels 2and the mind melts Voidrunnerwhich is Gridrunner with four player ships and searing light synthesizer-inspired effects) everything started to go wrong. Minter, as is often the case, chose the wrong hardware and wasted years on a failed British games console project called the Konix Multi-System (the Digital Eclipse collection includes an unfinished Konix game – an extremely rare curiosity). The pace of his development slowed radically. In 1994 he made a triumphant comeback with his masterpiece. Storm 2000 for the Atari Jaguar – where The Jeff Minter Story ends abruptly, presumably at the exact moment Minter becomes a fully-fledged artist.

In a way it’s understandable: many of Minter’s best games from the last 30 years, including ones like Space giraffe And Polybiusremain available for purchase on Steam and elsewhere, and presumably neither Minter nor Digital Eclipse want to exploit Llamasoft’s meager sales. But it does mean that this otherwise insightful, funny and extremely detailed portrait of a unique video game artist cuts him off in his prime.

But it’s still worth taking a look at. If you do, don’t do like I did and play all 43 games – play these five instead.

Grid Runner (1982)

Minter’s dazzling, supercharged remix from Atari centipede is undoubtedly the best game of his early years and one he would return to again and again. It took him a week from start to finish to write the original VIC-20 version.

Hell’s Gate (1984)

Hell’s Gate adopts the dual-axis shooting action of Laser zone and reflects it cruelly across four axes, controlled simultaneously. “The whole idea of Hell’s Gate “was partly a conscious attempt to overwhelm,” says Minter in the collection’s documentation, “but still give enough control to be the cause.” I wanted to force entry into the “zone,” the place where you go and what you’re so good at Robotron that you don’t really understand why, but damn, it feels good. The game feels impossible at first, but when you actually play it, it starts to work.”

color space (1985)

Minter’s development of him Psychedelic The Light Synthesizer for the Atari 8-bit computer is even more fascinating and offers a ton of parameters to play around with if you want to get under the hood. Put on Pink Floyd, grab a joystick and rest.

Revenge of the Mutant Camels 2 (1986)

Minter’s final game for his beloved Commodore 64 is one of his richest and most characterful, with modern features like an upgrade shop and a grid map with unlockable locations. Each level has its own atmosphere and a wild collection of surreal enemies for your marching, leaping camel to spit on.

Storm 2000 (1994)

Minter’s intense, techno-driven remix of the classic vector-graphic Atari arcade cab – in which enemies crawl through a 3D tube towards your vehicle and cling to its outer edge – is simply one of the greatest shmups of all time. There’s something about looking across the pitch into nothingness that fits perfectly with his psychedelic flow-state feel.