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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."
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
No, but the grue gets a twinkle in its eye and the supply crates contain various contraceptives.
liqbase
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.
I think you're confusing Barry Manilow and Barry White. Well, I seriously hope you're confusing them.
Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar, (or the version for the Nuon), which is what Space Giraffe in the article has evolved from.
It's all about playability, and changing the game mechanics to fit the game. And fluffy animals. Jeff is one of the few people who will take a classic game gendre and make his version play different. For instance Sheep in Space for the C64 was a Defender clone. Until you pushed the joystick upwards and your sheep flipped upside down and the gravity started pulling him towards the land speeding above. This is the step he's taken with Space Giraffe. Underneath it looks like his past work on Tempest, but the gameplay is different. Try playing it like Tempest and you'll get swamped in no time at all, learn the new method and you'll be hooked for life. Fluffy animals? Well that's his life, and in the games he gets off with it because it's cute, he's eccentric, and his coding is so good that your fluffy animal is the best thing you've flown!