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How Jeff Minter Met The 360
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!'."
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.