INTERVIEW: JEFF MINTER

The legendary Llama master on retro gaming, assorted beasties and his new software synth Neon for Xbox 360

Boot up your Xbox 360 this November and the chances are one of the first things you'll notice is the shining lights, pretty patterns and soothing music of Neon, the software synth and visualisation software which decorates the 360's new front end.
Funnily enough for such a cutting edge console, Neon is actually the product of a man who made his name during the formative years of the golden age of gaming, Jeff Minter, he of the long hair, bushy beard and strange obsession with llamas.

His fans include such luminaries as Louis Theroux, Aphex Twin and most pertinently Microsoft head honcho J Allard but Minter has always had a modest outlook on life and gaming. He lives in a small Welsh village and as you'd expect he has a rather unique relationship with animals (no not in that way you mucky pup), as he shares his existence with herds of llamas, sheep and pygmy goats. We tracked him down to hear his thoughts on life, gaming, llamas and the Xbox 360.

How and why did you get into the games industry?
Jeff Minter: I'd taught myself to make games for my mates on the school Pet (made by Commodore in the early 1980s and one of the first successful home computers). I was about 16, there were very few decent games around, so I decided to write my own. I never thought about it as a career, I was just doing what I thought was a good thing.

Many of your bestsellers were 'homages' to arcade classics like Defender. Why didn't later classics inspire you?

Jeff Minter: I got more into doing my own thing later on. Everyone starts off doing a clone of something, but slowly you develop your own ideas. And I covered my favourite classics with Llamatron and Tempest anyway.

What do you miss most about the golden age of 8-bit programming?

Jeff Minter: It was done and dusted so quickly - you could turn out a game in a month and they were small, almost instant projects. Now you're there for a year or two and you don't get the immediacy. But I wouldn't have it any other way, because look at all the stuff you can do - it's amazing. I'm doing things I couldn't imagine before. The 8-bit days were great times, but these are great times too.

You concentrated on developing for consoles for much of the '90s. Why so little for the PC?

Jeff Minter: It's a question of what was interesting at the time - Pcs weren't games machines, you had CGA graphics and I chose the Atari Jaguar. It's different now, but it's still a nightmare compared to consoles - you have to deal with so many configurations - it's a tremendous burden on developers to do all the platform checking. If you're a small company like us, with only two people working code, given the choice you'll pick consoles.

Unity's never going to come out is it?

Jeff Minter: There's no plans to release it at the moment. It's a huge project, it'd take me two years to do and I'd rather do more short term projects. That's not to say ideas from it won't surface anywhere else. Hopefully we'll be doing some games work on it on the Xbox 360. The Neon engine's pefect for the trippy kind of games I do.

Is Neon a game, is it an orchestration kit, or is it so alien to the common conception of technology that it doesn't really fit into any category?

Jeff Minter: It's definitely not a game in that there's no objective, no boss. It's an interactive entertainment experience. I men one of the things I've always striven to do is to interact, where you can do something where you can get involved, so you're not just listening to the music, you're performing along with it. With Neon, multiple users can use it at once, the first time a couple of guys came down to try it out, we were jamming for nine hours together, just us, a big screen and some good music.

So what's your ongoing fascination with beasties like llamas?

Jeff Minter: I always liked beasties - and I always liked games - so it seemed sensible to put them together. There'll always be beastie references in whatever I do - it depends on what platform I'm working on.

Having produced so many of them (Trip-A-Tron, Psychedelia etc), what's the fascination with light synthesisers?

Jeff Minter: I just always wanted to have one and no-one was making them. I first had the idea for Neon in 1990, but the tech didn't exist for a modular visual synthesiser, the hardware wasn't up to it: now it is. It's very compact, very efficient and produces fantastic visuals. It takes things to a new level; others will look at it and they'll have to raise their game. Plus, great visualization software will follow, which is good for everyone, whatever platform.

What was your best game and platform?

Jeff Minter: Ancipital on the Commodore 64 - although Llamatron was the most universally accessible. Platform-wise, I enjoyed the Atari Jaguar - it was new and experimental, a big step up on anything else around at the time.

You have a reputation for picking lost causes when it comes to hardware (Jaguar, the ill-fated Nuon console). Why is that?

Jeff Minter: I work on things that interest me. Nuon arose because some friends from Atari were starting up and asked if I wanted to get involved - to have a part in the chip design, which I'd never done before. I had other offers from larger companies, but I chose that. I'm not motivated by the most money and Microsoft isn't exactly a lost cause...

Any current game you would have liked to work on?

Jeff Minter: Katamari Damacy (insane Japanese PlayStation 2 game). It's superb, full of humour and totally unique. I would have put the right 'baah' sound in though. At the moment, if you roll over a sheep it makes a goat sound - that really annoys me!

Any advice for would-be farmers and/or games developers?

Jeff Minter: Make stuff you love, don't watch the market. Games development won't always be about big business: now that distribution is online, smaller publishers and platforms have a chance. You don't have to be hooked up to a big company to succeed.

...And Microsoft?

Jeff Minter: I don't work for them - I work with them...