A fascinating compilation from the makers of Atari 50, including such off-the-wall classics as Tempest 2000, Gridrunner, and Attack of the Mutant Camels.
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is a fascinating “interactive documentary” from Digital Eclipse, which previously applied the same format to Atari 50, a 50th-anniversary celebration of the legendary company’s early arcade and home games. Like Atari 50, The Jeff Minter Story collects a huge range of playable, carefully emulated classic games, and puts them in context via a wealth of background material: video clips, photographs, artwork, documentation, and more, all presented via an interactive timeline. There’s one major difference: Everything in The Jeff Minter Story is essentially the work of one man.
Jeff Minter is one of the most enduring and iconoclastic figures in indie game development, a lone gunman with an inimitable style who’s been pursuing his own unique agenda — a blend of classic arcade games, trippy psychedelia, and animals belonging to the ungulate family — for over 40 years. The 61-year-old self-taught coder and designer came of age in the early-’80s homebrew computing scene in the U.K. and simply never left that way of working behind. I had the pleasure of profiling Minter last year; he’s a true character, with a perspective on almost the entire history of video game development that’s both poignant and refreshing.
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is a great way to get to know Minter and to understand more about his work. The documentary set collects 42 games from the early part of his career, between 1981 and 1994, plus one modernized remaster by the Digital Eclipse team, Gridrunner Remastered. The best way to take it in is to explore the interactive timeline, watching the informative video clips — directed by Paul Docherty, who’s currently producing a feature documentary about Minter — and dipping into games occasionally as you go.
I, however, decided to play all 43 games back to back, in chronological order.
This is a very silly way to approach The Jeff Minter Story. It was sometimes frustrating, repetitive, and overwhelming. Minter games go very hard: brutal speed, challenging gameplay ideas, eye-watering visuals, and untethered surrealism are the norm. Also, many of the early games included are pretty crude. Nevertheless, my strange quest shone a light on both the amazing scope of what Digital Eclipse has achieved with this package, and the limitations of it.
It’s an amazing experience to watch an artist form before your eyes like this, as their preoccupations and signature quirks pop up one by one, and their design ideas are refined over time and gradually start to coalesce into a coherent whole. There are very few video game creators you could do this with, either because their work is more dissipated and collaborative, or because their games aren’t so blindingly immediate or so intensely personal.
It helps that Minter is incredibly prolific — or was, at the start of his career — and is also a shoot-from-the-hip iterator who has no qualms about working out the kinks in his ideas in public. In fact, there are a lot fewer than 43 individual games here, because Digital Eclipse includes many of the ports Minter and his friends made as they knocked out copies of his hits on new systems.
