Click Here For The Original Article at RGTMRetroGaming Times Monthly wrote:To most gamers today, Jeff Minter is known as the guy who programmed Tempest 2000 or who is working on that rather weird sounding Unity. But to those whose earliest gaming memories go back to the early 1980's, Jeff Minter is regarded as the most respected and most well known Vic 20 programmer. His games are among the most playable and they certainly pushed the humble Vic 20 further than many thought possible.
The Vic 20 was the first proper computer Jeff Minter owned. He would set up his Vic on his parent's TV and literally program his first games laying on his parent's lounge room floor. Jeff quickly learned to program simple games, but found the built in basic too restrictive. So Jeff taught himself machine code, and the rest so they say is history.
Jeff's first commercial game was "Andes Attack". In Jeff's own words, "Andes Attack was a pretty poor and buggy game, but it was written in machine code and not BASIC like 99 percent of the crap on the market at that time." Andes Attack caught the eye of HES, and thus started a partnership that carried on successfully for a number of years. Jeff's games were sold in two ways. Llamasoft distributed games on tape or disk while HES distributed games on cartridge.
Jeff's big break came with "Gridrunner". At one point it was in the top 10 best seller list for both the Vic 20 and the Commodore 64 at the very same time. Gridrunner, is about alien Droids in the year 2190 who are stealing electricity from Earth's orbiting power station, the "Grid. " To stop them, a combat ship patrols the Grid. In the game, the Grid is a large lattice on the screen, and Earth's combat ship moves along the lower portion, firing on segmented Droids, dodging the X/Y Zappers, and eliminating mutating yellow pods which sometimes lodge in the lattice. Gridrunner has been described as Centipede on steroids.
And that has always been Jeff Minter's strong point, to take an established game and "super-charge" it with some of the most frantic and demanding gameplay you will ever find. Jeff's main influences and favourite games probably come as no surprise. Eugine Jarvis, the creator of the classics Defender and Robotron, is one of Jeff's biggest heroes. Star Wars Arcade and Tempest are two of his other favourite games.
The Vic 20 has a real special place in Jeff Minter's heart. He's sees it as the machine that helped launch Llamasoft, and effectively his career as a programmer. He still owns his first Vic 20 and claims he will never throw it out.
Jeff says that the biggest challenge he had to face with the Vic 20 was "NO MEMORY! The only way around that was just to come up with clever designs and code 'em tight." But that discipline learnt long ago on the Vic 20 has helped Jeff remain a tight and efficient programmer. In some recent interviews Jeff admitted to writing a version of Gridrunner on the PC in less than 5k, just to see if he could still do it.
Jeff Minter is simply a legend when it comes to the Vic 20, and his legend certainly continued with the Commodore 64, the Atari ST and even later on the Jaguar. Thanks to his generosity we can continue to enjoy Jeff's classic games on emulation. He has often said in interviews that he is happy for people to have and distribute copies of his old games. "So as far as I am concerned, as long as they are freely distributed and not sold for profit, all old Llamasoft game images for use on emulators can be freely uploaded on any site anywhere, with my full permission. I hate it when you go to download an emu and there are no games because everyone is so scared of getting busted by some selfish old dinosaur."
The following are the games written by Jeff Minter for the Vic 20.
Andes Attack
Aggressor
Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time
Gridrunner
Abductor
Traxx
Matrix
Laser Zone
Hell Gate
Deflex
(You may have to scroll down the page to the ariticle.)
All in all, it seems a very fair review of Jeff and his work in general. Not much about the games themselves, but cool anyways.