Jeff Minter

Jeff Minter (born 22 April 1962) is an English video game designer and programmer who often goes by the name Yak.

He wrote the game Deflex for the Commodore PET in 1979.

However it would not be until a long illness during a university year that Minter's talents would develop in any meaningful way.

He is the founder of software house Llamasoft and has created dozens of games during his career, which began in 1981 with games for the ZX80.

Minter's games are shoot 'em ups which contain titular or in-game references demonstrating his fondness of ruminants (llamas, sheep, camels, etc.).

Many of his programs also feature something of a psychedelic element, as in some of the earliest "light synthesizer" programs including Trip-a-Tron.

Following a three-month stint due to a sudden eruption of pericarditis, in which Minter was restricted to lying on his back and was confined to his bed between November 1981 and January 1982, boredom led him to take up computer programming in earnest to pass the time.

Upon recovery, Minter teamed up with Richard Jones, a fellow pupil, and together they started writing their own games on their school's Commodore PET.

They soon parted ways.

Jones went on to commercial projects, some of them in the software market (e.g., Interceptor Micros).

In 1981 Minter started independently writing and selling video games for the ZX80, the first machine he owned.

Some were made for software company dk'tronics.

These titles were sold as a package but this was not available for very long, as Minter left the company following a royalties dispute.

He formed a partnership with his mother, Hazel Minter.

Together they developed and commercially produced 20 games for the ZX81, VIC-20, Atari 8-bit family, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64.

Having been studying physics at the University of East Anglia, success in the programming industry prompted him to drop his studies and take up video game development full-time.

The following year, he founded the software house Llamasoft.

His first Llamasoft game was a Defender clone for the VIC-20 called Andes Attack (US version: Aggressor).

In Andes Attack, little llamas advanced upon and attacked the player instead of the spaceships from Defender.

It was a remake of Dave Theurer's 1981 Tempest.

The conversion was released and published for Christmas 1983 by Quicksilva Ltd., UK.

Jeff Minter's original Commodore version was written in a week and marked his first commercial success both in the UK and in the US.

Minter went on to develop a number of games for the Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit family, and Atari ST which were marketed by word of mouth and magazine advertisements.

These included Gridrunner, Abductor, Matrix: Gridrunner 2, Hellgate, Hover Bovver, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Return of the Mutant Camels, Laser Zone, Mama Llama, Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time, Sheep in Space, Voidrunner, and Iridis Alpha.

Minter then wrote games for the Pocket PC platform, some of which also have Windows conversions: Deflex, Hover Bovver 2: Grand Theft Flymo (a reinterpretation of his own 1984 game, Hover Bovver), and Gridrunner++.

In 1989, Minter helped in the production of the Konix Multisystem console.

Minter worked for Atari and VM Labs.

Listing Minter in their "75 Most Important People in the Games Industry of 1995", Next Generation called him the Jaguar's "leading developer".

Minter also produced the Virtual Light Machine (VLM-1) for the Jaguar CD add-on.

For VM Labs he created the VLM-2 and Tempest 3000.

As a fan of Defender, Minter would remake it again as Defender 2000.

Through the Brighton-based software house, Salamander Software, Minter had his games written for the Spectrum and other home microcomputers.

It was Mr S.A. Tenquist who was responsible for the ZX Spectrum 16K version of Gridrunner.

For Atari he produced Tempest 2000 (1994) on the Jaguar.

He followed it with Defender 2000 (1995) on the Jaguar, a remake of the 1981 arcade game.

In 2002, he began work on a music video game for the GameCube to be called Unity.

Using the newest version of his VLM, the VLM-3 or Neon, Unity was to combine the two main threads of Minter's prior career: light synthesis and classic arcade style shooting.

Minter was involved in writing this game for Lionhead Studios throughout 2003.

Minter's works include the music visualisation program Neon (2004) which is built into the Xbox 360 console, and the video games Gridrunner, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Tempest 2000, and Polybius.

Minter began programming computers at a young age.