Jeff Minter
Jeff "Yak " Minter ( born April 22, 1962 in Reading) is a computer game developer from England, in 1982, the company Llamasoft founded and developed a number of games for the VIC-20, C -64, Amiga, Atari ST and Atari Jaguar.
From 1982 to 1987 he was one of the most colorful people in the nascent computer games industry, probably because in his plays constantly appeared camels and llamas.
Computer Games
1981 Jeff Minter began writing games for the Sinclair ZX80, which he also sold. In 1982 he founded the software company Llamasoft. The first game he drove under this brand, was Andes Attack ( U.S. version: Aggressor ), a Defender - copy for the VC20. Instead of spaceships in Defender here were small llamas in the game. His second game Grid Runner Minter wrote in just one week and was his first great success in England and in the United States.
Minter then wrote a number of classic computer games that he developed all in assembly language. He wrote these games mainly for the then successful home computers C-64, Atari 400, Atari 800 and Atari ST. The games he sold mainly through word of mouth and for the placement of advertisements in the major computer magazines.
After the collapse of the home computer market Minter worked for the company Atari and the VM Labs. For Atari he wrote Tempest 2000 (1994) on the Atari Jaguar, a remake of Dave Theurer 's classic Tempest in 1981; for the VM Labs developed Minter software for the Nuon chip - including Tempest 3000 The Nuon chip is used in DVD players from Samsung - ., there also Nuon games can be executed.
At this time, Minter released three more games: Deflex, Hover Bovver ( remakes his own game from the 80's under the same name ), and the PC / Mac game Grid Runner , an extension of the Grid Runner game from the 80s.
2002 Minter began work on a project for the Nintendo GameCube. The project ran under the name of Unity. It involved the combination of two topics that Minter had already employs two decades: light synthesizer and computer games. Jeff Minter wrote the play for Peter Molyneux Lionhead Studios, but the project was terminated before completion in December 2004.
Parts of the program have been converted and extended, and found in the new Microsoft Xbox 360 use ( as a light synthesizer while playing music on the Xbox 360). For the PC, a version of the optical synthesizer is provided with the name " Neon". When Neon appears on the PC, is unclear.
On August 22, published in 2007, Jeff Minter his long-awaited game Space Giraffe for Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade. The strongly reminiscent of Tempest game costs 400 Microsoft Points (about $ 5 ). The critics were divided into two camps, either hated or loved the critics, the optically and acoustically designed in the usual Jeff Minter - psychedelics - style game. So it was ( out of 10 possible points ) from the Official Xbox 360 magazine only 2 points from IGN 4.7 and Team Xbox 4.3, while Game Almighty a score 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 has sold only 10,000 times in the first two weeks, Jeff Minter very angry.
Minter is currently developing games for iPhone and iPad.
The best-known titles in Germany
- Attack of the Mutant Camels
- Revenge of the Mutant Camels
- Grid Runner ( also titled Matrix)
- Hover Bovver
- Tempest 2000, Tempest 3000, Defender 2000