I’ve played 43 psychedelic Jeff Minter games in a row and now my brain is a puddle

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is a fascinating ‘interactive documentary’ from Digital Eclipse, to which the same format was previously applied Atari 50, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the legendary company’s early arcade and home games. Like it Atari 50, The Jeff Minter Story collects a huge range of playable, carefully recreated classic games and puts them into context through a wealth of background material: video clips, photos, illustrations, documentation and more, all presented via an interactive timeline. There is one big difference: everything in it 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 pursuing his own unique agenda: a mix of classic arcade games, trippy psychedelia and animals belonging to the ungulate family – for more than 40 years. The 61-year-old self-taught programmer and designer came of age in the homebrew computer scene of the early ’80s in Britain and has simply never left that way of working behind. Last year I had the pleasure of profiling Minter; he’s a real 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 understand more about his work. The documentary set includes 42 games from early in his career, between 1981 and 1994, plus a modernized remaster from the Digital Eclipse team, Gridrunner remastered. The best way to take it in is to explore the interactive timeline, watch the informative video clips (directed by Paul Docherty, who is currently producing a documentary about Minter) and play the occasional game of games.

However, I decided to play all 43 games back to back, in chronological order.

This is a very silly way to approach it The Jeff Minter Story. It was frustrating, repetitive and overwhelming at times. Coin games go terribly difficult: brutal speed, challenging gameplay ideas, eye-popping visuals and unfettered surrealism are the norm. Additionally, many of the early games are quite crude. Nevertheless, my strange search shed light on both the astonishing scope of what Digital Eclipse has achieved with this package, and its limitations.

It’s a wonderful experience to watch an artist emerge before your eyes in this way, as their preoccupations and signature idiosyncrasies emerge one by one, and their design ideas are refined over time and gradually begin to merge into a coherent whole. There are few video game makers you could do this with, either because their work is more fragmented and collaborative, or because their games aren’t as blindingly direct or as intensely personal.

It helps that Minter is – or was, early in his career – incredibly productive 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 far fewer than 43 individual games here, as Digital Eclipse includes many of the ports that Minter and friends created when they cranked out copies of his hits on new systems. Rather than cheapening the package, these highlight both Minter’s evolving technology and way of working. It is interesting to see how the ports of games for the Commodore VIC-20 computer to its more powerful successor, the Commodore 64, often resemble more primitive, as Minter’s experience with the older system contrasts with him learning the ropes of the new one.

Many of his early games are unapologetic ripoffs of arcade classics such as Defender And Centipede, with one or two of his own ideas thrown in. (In fact, Minter’s 1981 unlicensed version of Centipede because the incredibly primitive Sinclair ZX81 computer was made without playing the original.) Sometimes those insertions are character blandnesses, like replacing the AT-ATs in a The empire strikes back game with camels in it Attack of the mutated camels. Sometimes they’re diamond-hard nuggets of game design genius, like the hardened nodes that clutter and block the gameplay field in his game. Centipede-inspired classic from 1982, Grid runner. Minter was perhaps a forerunner of today’s modding communities in the way he incorporated his personal quirks into his favorite games.

It’s wonderful to see how Minter’s personality also comes through in the games. First it’s his way with the words: “EXCESS BAT MISERY,” a simple bat-and-ball game proclaims Deflex V if you put too many bats on the field. Then surreal visual accents begin to appear, as a whole Monty Python hand of God that plucks the player off the screen into the almost unplayable Ratman. Then come the strobing visual effects, after which the games become much faster and the sound becomes more intense. 1982 Andean attack begins a lifelong obsession by replacing the people in one Defender clone with llamas. There is a satirical, parochial Englishness to films like 1983 Headbangers heaven and lawn mower action game Hover Bovver.

Even better are the design ideas, cunning in their simplicity, that Minter uses to mix up the usually classic move-and-zap action. In 1983 Laser zonethe player simultaneously controls two turrets on the X and Y axes of the screen. The laser-spitting llamas of Metagalactic lamas fight at the edge of time their shots bounce off a force field that the player can raise or lower to control the rebounds. The action in 1984 Sheep in space hangs between gravitational fields that bend shots up or down.

The problem with this collection is its limited scope, combined with Minter’s absurd early productivity. The first 31 games in the collection only cover the years 1981 through 1984; there are twelve games from 1983 alone. It is heavily focused on titles that are academically interesting, but can be excruciating to play. From 1984 onwards the story changes. Minter embarked on a highly experimental phase that yielded some bizarre results, such as compiling minigames Batalyxa typically strange and brutal flirtation with non-linear action-adventure Ambiguousand it’s completely confusing Mama llama. It also provided something of a revelation Psychedelia, a beautiful, beautifully coded light synthesizer for the C64 that would begin a lifelong love affair with light synths and music visualizations. (It’s telling that, on average, Minter spent far more time coding his light synths than on his games.)

Then, after a great run of advanced and technically brilliant shooters for the C64 in 1986-7 (Iridis Alpha, Revenge of the mutant camels 2and the melting of the mind Voidrunnerthat is Grid runner with four-player ships and searing light-synth-inspired effects) it all started to go wrong. Minter, as he often did, used the wrong hardware and wasted years on a failed British games console project called the Konix Multi-System (an unfinished Konix game is included in the Digital Eclipse collection – a super rare curiosity). His pace of development slowed down radically. In 1994 he made a triumphant comeback with his masterpiece, Storm 2000 for the Atari Jaguar – and that’s true The Jeff Minter Story ends abruptly, perhaps at the moment when Minter becomes a fully formed artist.

To some extent it’s understandable: many of Minter’s best games from the past 30 years, including games like Space Giraffe And Polybius, remain commercially available on Steam and elsewhere, and presumably neither Minter nor Digital Eclipse want to cannibalize Llamasoft’s meager sales. But it means that this otherwise insightful, funny and extremely detailed portrait of a unique video game artist cuts him in his prime.

However, it’s still worth checking out. If so, don’t be like me and play all 43 games; play these five instead.

Grid Runner (1982)

Minter’s blinding, super-powered remix from Atari Centipede is undoubtedly the best game of his early years, and one he would return to again and again. Writing the original VIC-20 version took him a week, from start to finish.

Hellgate (1984)

Hellgate takes over the two-axis shooting action Laser zone and cruelly mirrors it across four axes, controlled simultaneously. “The whole idea of Hellgate was partly a deliberate attempt to overwhelm,” Minter says in the collection’s documentary material, “yet to provide sufficient control to determine the cause. I wanted to force entry into the ‘zone’, the place you go that makes you so good Robotron that you don’t really understand why, but damn, it feels good. The game feels impossible at first, but when you actually play it, it starts to work.”

Color space (1985)

Minter’s evolution of him Psychedelia light synthesizer for the Atari 8-bit computer is even more enchantingly beautiful, with a ton of parameters to play with if you want to get under the hood. Put on some Pink Floyd, grab a joystick and rest.

Revenge of the Mutant Camels 2 (1986)

Minter’s latest game for his beloved Commodore 64 is one of his most lush and characterful, with modern features like an upgrade shop and a grid map with locations to unlock. Each level has a distinct atmosphere and a wild collection of surreal enemies for your marching, leaping camel to spit at.

Storm 2000 (1994)

Minter’s intense, techno-driven remix of the classic vector-graphic Atari arcade booth – in which enemies crawl through a 3D tube towards your vehicle, clinging to the outer lip – is simply one of the greatest shmups of all time. There’s something about staring at the playing field into the void that suits his psychedelic, flow-state sensibilities perfectly.