Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is releasing on March 13, 2024, on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows,on Steam and GOG.
This is the second title in Digital Eclipse’s Gold Disc series, and it promises to be a truly special piece of video game celebration. Like The Making of Karateka, the title comes in the form of an interactive documentary, with a video portion, and then featuring several production materials you can interact with at will. Part of those production materials are the actual games that Minter made, and Digital Eclipse managed to license 42 of said games.
Jeff Minter joins the illustrious group of 1980s American video game developers that helped definte what video games would be for a brief generation. What distinguishes him from his peers, such as David Crane, Howard Scott Warshaw, and Carol Shaw, is that he spent most of that early period in his career publishing his own games, in a business partnership with his mother.
Minter was best known for making games on the Commodore 64, the VIC-20, ZX81, ZX Spectrum, and the Atari 8-bit family of computers. His games often dabbled in themes of psychedelia, and funnily enough, the Camelids. His games often had camels, and more famously, llamas. His software studio was itself called Llamasoft.
Minter’s later work are essentially recreations of those 8-bit games, reimagined for modern systems. In the last console generation alone, he released titles like Tempest 4000, Moose Life, Akka Arrh, and Polybius. None of these games are going to be part of Digital Eclipse’s release, but are all available to buy separately.
Polybius warrants a mention, as a now real game based on an urban legend of a lost arcade game that was secretly part of a government project to test its psychoactive effects on teenagers. Jeff briefly got in on the act, claiming he was making the game based on the little he got to play of the game in the 1980s. He did recant this story later.
Also worth talking about, as an ugly footnote unlikely to see rerelease ever again, was TxK. TxK was a PlayStation Vita release, a tube shooter essentially in the same vein as Tempest 2000. Atari threatened litigation against Jeff, blocking release to other platforms. Disappointingly enough, Sony did not back up Jeff Minter and Llamasoft, ensuring this game would never be released again.
Or at least, this version of the game. Llamasoft and Atari did agree to a settlement of sorts, never going to the courts. Jeff reworked TxK into what we now know as Tempest 4000.
This title is more likely to excite older gamers, but even if you didn’t grow up on Jeff Minter’s games, his wild tale of independent video game development and psychedelia is a worthwhile experience on its own.
You can check out the official trailer for Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story below.
