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Catching Up With Jeff Minter
Gamasutra's Brandon Sheffield has a nice interview up today with Jeff Minter, 50% of the indie gaming force that is Llamasoft. He was the creative force behind the visualization for the Xbox 360, and is currently working on the title Space Giraffe for Live Arcade. They touch on Minter's work ethic, past projects, and a canceled GameCube project that never quite made it out the door. They also, of course, discuss Minter's plans for the future: "One thing I would like to explore in the future is making music more involved with the game, so that the type of music you put on would determine how the level played. Some music might create a more chilled level, whereas heavy metal and heavy techno might be more intense. I've got so many ideas, but we can't do them all on the first outing."
... new mutant camels?
Jeff's been generating amazing ideas at an amazing rate since the early 80s - sadly AFAIK none of them have really gone anywhere, as others have said he's had the touch of death for consoles too numerous to mention :(
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
That's the beauty of the idea, and the reason why Jeff Minter is still regarded as a gaming genius: his completely off-the-wall ideas have a tendency to become common-place after a few years. Procedural worlds? Check. Music that controls the game? Check. Yes, the devil is in the detail, but that's the other reason he is a gaming genius: he gets stuff to work that other people simply theorize about.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar, (or the version for the Nuon), which is what Space Giraffe in the article has evolved from.