Everything about Llamasoft totally explained
Jeff 'Yak' Minter (born in
Reading,
April 22 1962) is a
British computer/
video game designer and
programmer. He is the founder of software house
Llamasoft and his recent works include the
light synthesizer (called
Neon) built into the
Xbox 360 console and the
Xbox Live Arcade video game
Space Giraffe.
Many of his games include certain distinctive elements—they are often arcade style
shoot-em-ups. His fondness of
llamas,
sheep,
camels etc. often leads to them appearing in his games or the titles (
Llamatron,
Llamazap,
Attack of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Sheep in Space, etc.). Also many feature something of a
psychedelic element, as in some of the earliest 'light synthesizer' programs such as his
Trip-a-Tron.
In online forums and informal game credits pages Minter usually signs as "Yak", which is, in his own words
"a pseudonym chosen a long time ago, back in the days when hi-score tables on coin-op machines only held three letters, and I settled on Yak because the yak is a scruffy hairy beast - a lot like me ;-)."
Jeff currently writes a monthly column for UK-based digital game magazine
EDGE.
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 (for example,
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'd 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
U.S..
Minter went on to develop a number of classic games, all written in
assembly language, 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. These games included:
Gridrunner,
Matrix,
Hellgate,
Hover Bovver,
Attack of the Mutant Camels,
Revenge of the Mutant Camels,
Revenge of the Mutant Camels 2,
Laser Zone,
Mama Llama,
Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time,
Sheep in Space,
Void Runner, and
Iridis Alpha.
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 (reworkings 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 cancelled 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 visualisation.
(External Link
)
His most recent release is
Space Giraffe, an action arcade game with similarities to
Tempest.
Space Giraffe was released for
Xbox 360 on
22 August,
2007 through
Xbox Live Arcade for 400 Microsoft Points, or 5 USD.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Llamasoft'.
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