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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!'."
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.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2000-10- 23&res=l
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Open Source Sysadmin
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.
you do know they have toasters booting linux nowadays right? ;)
hackers of the world unite!
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.
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.