Jeff Minter |
Jeff Yak Minter (born in Reading, Berkshire, April 22 1962) is one of the most innovative and distinctive modern United Kingdom computer game/video game game designer and game programmer. He is the founder of software house Llamasoft.
Minter s games are as unmistakable 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 .
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 
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=Education=
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. Jones was never talented for programming in the way that Minter was (admittedly, few 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.
=Games=
In .
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 8-bit family and Atari ST) which were marketed mainly by word of mouth and by the odd computer magazine advertisement. After the collapse of the home computer market he worked for (now-defunct) Atari and for (now-defunct) VM Labs. For Atari he produced Tempest 2000 (1994) on the Atari Jaguar, a remake of Dave Theurer s classic Tempest (game) of 1981; for VM Labs, he designed software for the Nuon chip. Jeff Minter also created the VLM_(Game) & Tempest 3000 for the Nuon.
Later came a short spell writing games for the , an upgrade of his breakthrough game and by far the most popular of the three.
In 2002, Jeff began work on a project for the Nintendo but the project was canceled in December 2004.
The version of the VLM to be used within Unity has since been reprogrammed and significantly expanded. Now named Neon , it will be used in the Xbox 360 media visualization. [http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/655/655146p3.html]
=External links=
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