The solo developer has been making trippy arcade games for 40 years, and his latest reunites him with Atari, the publisher with which he made the classic Tempest 2000.
If it’s possible to be an institution and an outsider at the same time, then Jeff Minter is both. He is, perhaps, the last of the original lone gunmen in video games. As a self-taught teenage coder, he joined the explosive homebrew game development scene in the U.K. in the early 1980s, cranking out surreal home computer games inspired by the arcade classics, mostly on his own. Unlike most of his peers from that time, he has been doing pretty much exactly that ever since. For 40 years.
His latest game, the newly released Akka Arrh, reunites him with Atari, the company with which he made one of his most famous and brilliant games: Tempest 2000, a pounding, techno-infused 1994 reinterpretation of an already hypnotic 1981 arcade machine. Minter and Atari have had their ups and downs over the years, but something keeps drawing them back together. In this case, it’s a rare, unreleased arcade game that was thought lost for many years, and was rumored to be too difficult to release.
“There was only one guy who had a working copy of it; he had a coin-op and wouldn’t release the ROMs,” Minter tells me over a video call from Wales, where he lives in rural isolation, with a flock of sheep, a llama, a donkey, and his partner in life and work, Ivan “Giles” Zorzin. (Minter loves llamas, and also camels, sheep, moose, goats, and ungulates of all kinds, and takes every opportunity to put these animals in his games. His company is called Llamasoft.) He’s an affable, scruffy, 60-year-old longhair from the English Midlands with the sense of humor of a generation raised on Monty Python and recreational drugs: the sort you’d expect to find down the pub in a leather coat, talking about obscure prog rock. Behind him I can see disorderly piles of game controllers and musical equipment, guitars, and a poster for his 1983 game Attack of the Mutant Camels.
Anyway, back to Akka Arrh. The ROMs eventually got out — liberated by “somebody else who was maintaining [the guy’s] machines” — and you can now play the game (alongside Tempest 2000 and many other classics) as part of the excellent Atari 50 compilation. It’s a curious design: The player controls a turret in the center of the screen, destroying oncoming enemies by using shots to light up the petals of strangely beautiful, lotus flower-like designs. If enemies get too close, they invade an inner sanctum, and the game’s central (and rather aggravating) gimmick involves switching between these two levels to repel them.
Minter liked the look of it, and when Atari offered him the chance to adapt anything from its back catalog, it’s what he picked. But this was not the same task as remaking Tempest.
“It’s not so much that it’s really hard,” he says. “It’s that it’s not really engaging enough. Basically, the thing failed its field test, and I don’t think it’s for as simple a reason as it being too hard.” The game overwhelmed the player quickly, but so did classics like Minter’s all-time favorite, Eugene Jarvis’ Robotron. The problem was that it just wasn’t appealing enough to bring the player back. Something was missing.
The search for that missing something took a long time. “I had to do quite a bit of surgery on it, really,” Minter says. He slowed the game down to make it more palatable for home play, and started fooling around with the design. Minter works in an improvisational way, iterating on the design live in the code.
“I have to feel it, basically,” he says. “With this, I was working with various different ideas for how the game might work, how I might improve it, and I was getting nowhere for ages and ages and ages. It was after several months I finally made a breakthrough.”
What he came up with is a daring inversion of the kind of frenetic arcade games he is known for: a “cerebral shooter, almost like a puzzle game.” Rather than lighting up panels to destroy enemies, the player releases bombs that trigger chains of detonations, Missile Command-style.
