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How Jeff Minter Met The 360

Posted by Zonk on from the shiny-and-flashy-gets-together dept.

The Guardian Gamesblog has a piece on Jeff Minter's hookup with the Xbox 360. From the article: "It basically happened because a certain well-connected friend of mine really liked what we were doing here with VLM3 on the Gamecube, and brought someone from MS here to see. He in turn got very enthusiastic, and went back to MS and began bending ears. It took a fair bit of prodding and sending of demos but eventually it progressed to the point where I got hold of a devkit. Once we had proper live 360 code running it turned from 'maybe' to 'definitely!'."

35 comments

  1. The irony by baldass_newbie · · Score: 1

    From the article: "We have been using Xbox360 alpha dev kits (which are based on a dual-G5 platform)."

    No kidding. Too funny.

    --
    The opposite of progress is congress
    1. Re:The irony by amliebsch · · Score: 1

      I don't get it.

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    2. Re:The irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      The latest Apple development platform is x86 and the latest Microsoft dev platform is G5. Get it?

    3. Re:The irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Welcome to a month ago, buddy.

    4. Re:The irony by karnal · · Score: 1

      And the sad thing about that is you probably never will.

      --
      Karnal
    5. Re:The irony by amliebsch · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You do know that Microsoft doesn't sell computers, right? So they would have had to purchase the PPC dev kits from somebody, and it just so happens that Apple does (for now) indeed produce a fine PPC computer. Maybe it would be embarassing if they were using Apple's software, but they weren't. Maybe it's ironic/funny in some alternate universe when people use the right tool for the job, but not in mine.

      --
      If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
    6. Re:The irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.

    7. Re:The irony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MS does sell computers, they call them "game consoles".

      It would have been a lot more ironic if OS X-intel dev kits were modded Xboxes.

    8. Re:The irony by zulux · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      You do know that Microsoft doesn't sell computers, right?

      WTF is an XBOX then?

      It boots a shitty version of NT, and can boot Linux. Looks like a computer to me.

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    9. Re:The irony by defy+god · · Score: 2, Funny

      you do know they have toasters booting linux nowadays right? ;)

      --
      hackers of the world unite!
  2. MS And The Dreamcast 360 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's where all hip burnouts and has-beens go to die...

    Rare...try to find anyone from the original dev teams walking the halls...

    Bungie...getting bought out by MS hasn't changed anything...nope...not a thing...

    Minter...was somewhat cool back in the ST days, now...

    Landing in xbox land is basically letting the console world know you just don't give a shit anymore.

    1. Re:MS And The Dreamcast 360 by orkysoft · · Score: 1

      I hear ya. Llamatron on the ST made sure I stayed the hell away from drugs!

      --

      I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
    2. Re:MS And The Dreamcast 360 by rAiNsT0rm · · Score: 1

      Word.

      and don't forget Molyneux, Fable being an Xbox exclusive made no difference and in fact hurt sales figures severely.

      Xbox 360: "When You've Given Up Hope Of a Real Game Development Career!" Now with more hard to develop for cores so your games can suck better! (tm)(r)

      --
      http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
    3. Re:MS And The Dreamcast 360 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Rare...try to find anyone from the original dev teams walking the halls...
      There are a few, but unfortunately some of them have been promoted to the limit of their incompetence. And management is not under control from Nintendo anymore which gives them the freedom to develop "innovative" games.
      The real problem is that most key achievers have left and if Microsoft doesn't wake up it is unlikely that RARE is going to produce anything of value.
      I left because I couldn't see that happening.

    4. Re:MS And The Dreamcast 360 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Bungie...getting bought out by MS hasn't changed anything...nope...not a thing..."

      Yep - they're now wildly successful, making games that people actually play. However much you liked Marathon, very few people actually played it.

    5. Re:MS And The Dreamcast 360 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh god, put the xbox fanboy crackpipe down.

      Bungie is only getting high sales numbers from the obvious fact that they are the sole first party developer for MS.

      If they hadn't cashed in a few years ago with their sale to MS, Bungie would be nothing more than a company spitting out medicore shooters.

      'wildly successful' doesn't mean much when you are the only thing a company with billions to blow is bundling your product.

      Dream on if you think anything worthwile is ever going to come out of what is left of Bungie. Game dev houses don't sell themselves to go on to do great stuff, selling out is the end game.

      Although I'm sure Halo 3 or whatever they come out with in a year or so will be %30 more shiny, even with the wimpy 360 hardware.

  3. The real reason is obvious by xenocide2 · · Score: 2, Funny

    http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2000-10- 23&res=l

    --
    I Browse at +4 Flamebait

    Open Source Sysadmin

    1. Re:The real reason is obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah yes, this is /. after all. What would a story be without a sarcastic reply containing a Penny Arcade strip? You /. bots are so predictable.

      Not to razz on you though, but the Xbox 360 seems to be the easier of all the new next gen platforms to develop for.

    2. Re:The real reason is obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bzzzt!!!

      The 360 is turning out to be nightmare to code for. Three in-order cores, no real hardware until just recently, poor dev toolchain - Visual C and the Xbox DirectX version are like wearing high heel pumps in a obstacle course.

      MS really just slapped this stuff together at the last minute to try to get something out the door for Christmas. Almost everything they have been doing has been focused on making things shiny, and they clearly have no experience writing tools for or working with parallel embeded hardware. The stuff the guys doing our PS3 stuff are showing me that Sony and IBM really have their shit together.

      I feel like kicking the ass of every stupid teenager who spouts bullshit about "XNA!" The guys doing PS3 dev are living it up right now. Hopefully I'll be one of them soon. I don't know why the hell we are even bothering with a 360 version. It should be clear by now that this thing isn't going to be bought by anyone but the same group of people who bought the first xbox.

    3. Re:The real reason is obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...says the AC who
      a) doesn't know how to program
      b) hasn't seen hardware
      c) hasn't used the toolset

    4. Re:The real reason is obvious by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wrong,wrong,wrong.

      You lose. You have my pity if you are stuck with the 360. I'm off this POS very soon.

      PS3 and Cell here I come.

      Nobody wants to be stuck on a console hardware that is so weak and with such a poor toolset. Nobody wants to be stuck on another Dreamcast - which is what we are all calling the 360.

      Good luck Jeff, I hope MS dumped a shitload of cash on you up front, because the console itself is going nowhere.

      Back to my DMA chains...

  4. it pains me to even by torpor · · Score: 1

    consider that Jeff Minter .. is .. working .. for .. / .. with .. Microsoft .. on .. a .. potentially cool .. gaming .. platform.

    arrrggh!!! fuck embracing and extending the reality bubbles bill, i just wanna cry!

    --
    ; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
    1. Re:it pains me to even by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fucking lamer

  5. Who cares? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Honestly? The poster doesn't even say who Minter is.

    1. Re:Who cares? by snuf23 · · Score: 1

      If you don't know who Jeff Minter is... you won't care anyway!

      --
      Sometimes my arms bend back.
    2. Re:Who cares? by gmezero · · Score: 2, Informative

      Aside from his earlier C64 work and Llammatron for the Amiga, he's main claim to fame was the infamous Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar. The game frequently also called "the only reason to own a Jaguar". He also did the Virtual Light Machine (spectrum analyzer) for CD playback that was built into the Atari Jaguar CD unit. It was pretty impressive mind you, and was a staple of many a DJ's video arsenal for years afterwards. But, this was really the peak of is his career, and I hate to say it, he's been riding it ever since. His next game Defender 2000 was a pretty sad affair, and just about everything else has either flopped or been canned before being finished.

      I met him once at an E3 show and spoke with him for a little bit. A very nice, but peculiar fellow.

      In the end though, I'm really torn about this VLM3 business. Amazingly enough Tempest 2000 and the original VLM were so good, that even after all of this time Minter still has come positive credit on his balance sheet, and I'm almost considering this a high selling point for the 360... on the other hand, it so smacks of corporate whoring that I'm disgusted enough to make this another tick against buying it as a protest against Minter for beating a dead horse into mush. If it turns out that the VLM3 does everything that JagCD did and more, then I'll probably soften my stance, but this is all wait and see for me.

      OH what a conflict.

  6. Woohoo! by metamatic · · Score: 1

    Here's hoping Jeff's Xbox 360 projects herald the same kind of explosive growth for that platform as his Nuon and Jaguar projects did for those platforms.

    --
    GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
    1. Re:Woohoo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tempest is an absolute classic, and Jeff's rendition on the Jaguar (Tempest 2000 - http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?Softwar eLabelID=1111) is one of the best (video) games made thus far; Frenetic, addictive, almost kinda feels like Quake3 play in a restricted 3d environment + Lyserg-Säure-Diaethylamid (but that's always been the Minter style). Go Hovver Bovver!

      Check out the emulator http://pt.emuunlim.com/ which does a good job of running Tempest 2000 (that is assuming you're one of those rare people who own the cart, and can't be bothered pulling the Jag out of the box in the cupboard and hooking it up) *ahem*.

      Perhaps if more programmers utilised the hardware properly (like Jeff? don't know, but the game rocked and that's the point right?) rather than falling back to 68k ("yay, new console but sub-68k quality game" syndrome, where you then open the console and start poking custom chips - "hello! hellooooooooo! chip! are you there?!? work damn you!!!!!)... but then again if the dev kit was better+cheaper... or perhaps if a little thing called the Sony PlayStation wasn't just on the horizon... hmmmm. I know not... i'm with Ecclesiastes anyway :)

      RIP Atari, you stupid wonderful bastard of a company.

    2. Re:Woohoo! by metamatic · · Score: 1

      Yes, it actually saddens me that none of Jeff Minter's post-Atari ST stuff has been on platforms I use.

      --
      GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
  7. Ahh memories by lorelorn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Jeff Minter's Revenge of the Mutant Camels was one of the first computer games that really grabbed me, and it was a big part of me deciding to get a Commodore 64 back in the day.

    1. Re:Ahh memories by Keeper · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For me, it was Llamatron on the Atari ST ...

  8. Would be more interesting by Corpus_Callosum · · Score: 1

    This would be a lot more interesting if he actually got real Xbox360 hardware instead of the DualG5 kits. As it stands, this article is only causually interesting, insofar as 'the shader performance of our lightshow was great' goes...

    --
    The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
  9. Milking a pony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Keep milking that pony Jeff!

  10. Ooh! I'm good at these, just wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is it... me?

    (That's not right, is it? Shit.)