Home > Jeff Minter

Minter's games are as recognizable as the oeuvre of a literary writer. Almost all 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 .

Jeff Minter became interested in computertower of a personal computer. A computer is a device for making calculations or controlling operations that are expressible in numerical or logical terms. While factually accurate, this definition and those found in other dictionaries are so broad that ths 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 PETThe PET P ersonal E lectronic T ransactor was a home-/ personal computer produced by Commodore starting in the late 1970s. Although it was no top seller outside the Canadian, US, and UK educational markets, it was Commodore's first full-featured computer. Jones was never talented for programming in the way that Minter was (few admittedly are), and they soon parted ways. Jones went on to commercial projects, some of them in the software market (e.g., Interceptor Micros ), but never gained the industry fame that Minter earned.

In 1981Events January-February January Sarawak Chamber found January 1 Greece enters the EEC January 1 Palau becomes self-governing January 4 Sheffield police arrests Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper January 16 Protestant gunmen shoot and wound Bernadette D Jeff Minter started writing and selling Sinclair ZX80The Sinclair ZX80 was a home computer brought to market in 1980 by Sinclair Research. It was notable for being the first computer available in the United Kingdom for under a hundred pounds (a pricetag of £99. 95, to be exact). It was available in kit form video games. In 1982Events January January 6 William Bonin is convicted of being the "freeway killer". January 8 AT&T agrees to divest itself of twenty-two subdivisions January 11 Mark Thatcher, son of the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, disappears in the Sahara du he founded software house Llamasoft (a company that creates games rather than sells or distributes them is often called a houseA video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video or computer games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game system, such as the Sony PlayStation, or may develop for a variety of systems including P). His first game through Llamasoft was Andes Attack (US version: Aggressor ): a DefenderThis page is about the arcade game Defender . For other uses of the term, see Defender. Defender is a horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up arcade game created by Williams Electronics in 1980. It was programmed by Eugene Jarvis, who later formed Vid Kidz an clone for the Commodore VIC-20, but with little llamas instead of spaceships (a great fan of Defender he would remake it again, and better, as Defender 2000 ). His second Llamasoft game, Gridrunner , was written in a week and was his first real 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 (doomed) Atari and for (doomed) VM Labs . For Atari he produced Tempest 2000 ( 1994) on the Jaguar, a remake of Dave Theurer 's classic Tempest of 1981.

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-only Gridrunner++ , an upgrade of his breakthrough game and by far the most popular of the three.

As of early 2004, Jeff is working on a project for the Nintendo GameCube that goes by the name of Unity — the combination of the two main threads of Jeff's work: light synthesis and classic arcade style shooting. Jeff is writing this game for Peter Molyneux's Lionhead Studios.

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 ;-)."