Early years
Jeff Minter became interested in
computers while
attending secondary school. He teamed up with Richard Jones, a fellow pupil,
and together they started writing their own games on their school's
Commodore
PET. They soon parted ways. Jones went on to commercial projects, some of
them in the software market (e.g.,
Interceptor Micros).
Games
In
1981 Jeff Minter started writing and selling
Sinclair
ZX80 video games. In
1982 he founded software house Llamasoft (a company that
creates games rather than sells or distributes them is often called a
house). His first game through Llamasoft was
Andes Attack (US version:
Aggressor): a
Defender clone for the
Commodore
VIC-20, but with little llamas instead of spaceships (a fan of Defender,
he would remake it again as
Defender
2000). His second Llamasoft game,
Gridrunner, was written in a week and was his first
commercial success both in the
UK
and in the
USA.
Minter went on to develop a number of classic
games, all written in assembler, for the later home computers (such as the
Commodore
64,
Atari 400/800 and
Atari ST)
which were marketed mainly by word of mouth and by the odd
magazine advertisement. After the collapse of
the home computer market he worked for
Atari and for
(now-defunct)
VM
Labs. For Atari he produced
Tempest
2000 (1994)
on the
Jaguar, a remake of
Dave
Theurer's classic
Tempest
of 1981. Minter also produced
Defender
2000 (1995)
on the
Jaguar, a remake of
Eugene
Jarvis's classic
Defender. Minter also produced the
Virtual Light Machine (VLM) for the Jaguar
CD-ROM add-on. For VM Labs, Minter designed software for the
Nuon chip. Jeff
Minter also created the
VLM2 (Light Synth) &
Tempest
3000 for the
Nuon.
Later came a short spell writing games for the
Pocket PC
platform, some of which also had PC conversions (using a customized Pocket PC
emulator). During this time, Minter released three games:
Deflex,
Hover
Bovver (ports/remakes of his own early 80s games of the same name),
and the PC/Macintosh game
Gridrunner++.
In 2002, Jeff began work on a project for the
Nintendo
GameCube
with the name of
Unity — the combination of the two main
threads of Jeff's work: light synthesis and classic arcade style shooting.
Jeff was writing this game for
Peter
Molyneux's
Lionhead Studios but the project was canceled in
December 2004.
The version of the
VLM to be used within Unity has
since been reprogrammed and significantly expanded. Now named
Neon, it has been used in the
Xbox 360
media visualization.
