A black screen with a white dot in the center. We expected something like Ping Pong: simple, direct, immediate, and, as far as games go, ancient.
But then the spot moves, and in its wake we see a burst of light. The color patches fan out from pink to purple to teal. Light creates shapes, but what are these shapes? Starbursts, nebulae, volcanic eruptions. The screen seems to mirror the action, doubled down, so we see lots of crabs with two pincers raised to the sky, lots of mermaids with two fins, lots of Rorschach blots. Maybe that’s it. You look at these dancing lights, these ripples of color, all caused by a single white dot, and you see what you want to see.
This is 1984’s Psychedelia. This is designer Jeff Minter’s first light synthesizer, inspired by the colors and shapes he saw while lying in his room listening to Floyd’s music. I always knew Minter made light synthesizers because his later games, like Space Giraffe, often featured light synthesizers in the background. But after encountering Psychedelic midway through Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story , I began to appreciate them in a new way.
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story | Trailer Released
Going from the arcade games he’d previously made to something like Psychedlia? First of all, “transformation” is the wrong word. Leap won’t do that either. It’s like teleportation. He was doing one thing, and now he was suddenly doing something else. The end result is impossible to describe without some degree of mutual exclusivity. The psychedelic feeling is unprecedented, but when you look back at what happened before, there’s also a sudden sense of recognition. Oh, of course he did.
Jeff Minter’s story is a testament to gaming’s great digital romanticism and the treatment it gives its sponsors. This series continues to be exciting new content and is Digital Eclipse’s latest effort in game preservation. Not only do you get the game, you get the story behind it, unfolding in an interactive timeline that includes photos, testimonial fragments and design sketches, as well as delicious playable versions of classic games in various stages of development. It’s a museum, or a palace of games, and an ideal way to see old games and something you rarely get: context.
The context moves from one volume to the next. The latest Golden Master series looks at Karate, the precursor to Prince of Persia. I realize now that the way the story of Karate Ka unfolds provides insight into its creator. Brilliant and methodical, Jordan Mechner loves detail and the small, careful transitions from one thing to the next. This is the story of his breakthrough game, but also the story of a man who has preserved every fragment of his work, his own biographer, his own archivist.
Minter is so incredibly different. Here you’re told a story through game after game, all different in some fundamental way, all filled with color and energy, and a very British sense of absurdist humour. I now see that Minter’s games share common themes, but they also take strange leaps of imagination forward. It reminds me of some of the effects I get from reading a collection of Philip K. Dick’s stories. You’ll see the master return to a theme but change the variables each time to make something different.
When we’re talking about arcade games, the rewards are immediate. It’s an incredibly generous collection, although it hit people hard around 1994’s Tempest 2000 (and then, of course, it moved forward to Gridrunner Remastered, a gorgeous 2008 release that was made last year). A space blaster game to end it all) that ties in with Llamasoft’s 80s and 90s heritage is here. Lots of mutant llamas, lots of grid runners – this game looks like an epiphany; you can feel the apocalypse of Minter, and the hugely popular Llamatron: 2112, which is definitely one of my favorites to play The game with the most wins.
I say that, but really, for me, the star here is a Minter game I’ve never played before, or – to whisper – never really heard of. Psychedelics is something I’m trying to get away from now. It’s not the only light synthesizer here, but it’s my favorite. I’ve been stuck in this game for the past few days and don’t want to get out. I could even put on “Freud” myself.
Then there is the laser area. 1983. I personally like the Vic-20 version. It’s a blaster where you move the turrets as the aliens gather and scatter, but this is Minter, so you need to move two turrets, one up and down and the other side to side. It’s wild. I love it. I don’t know, but it might have been released yesterday. Very fresh! The same goes for sequels like Hellgate, where of course you can now move four turrets. 1984, that year.
All games are beautifully presented, with control guides, tons of additional information, and fast loading. But this isn’t just a collection of games. It’s truly a story, the story of a talented person creating a great game. It tells you where he came from: Tadley, a town famous for its broomstick manufacturing and home to the atomic weapons research facility where Minter’s father worked. “Even in the dead of night, our town is never completely quiet,” Minter explains. “The AWRE always had a steady industrial rumble, and you could lie in bed at night and listen to the ticking of the critical alarms guarding the reactor.” I’ve always known that Minter’s imagination was shaped by games like Robotron and Tempest . But what about this?
While you don’t get any of Llamasoft’s recent games, the series ends with an adorable video of Minter and his partner and co-developer Ivan “Giles” Zorzin. Finally, a lot of people acknowledge the brilliant, scary, gorgeous thing about Llamasoft that their games just keep getting better and better, Space Giraffe! Polybius! Aka-ah! All of this makes me think that Llamasoft 2: The Rest of the Jeff Minter Story will be unmissable if we can get it.
Digital Eclipse provided a copy of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story for review.
