Llamasoft And The Space Giraffe

Google Tech Talks
March 6, 2007

ABSTRACT

Jeff "Yak" Minter has been developing video games from the Sinclair Spectrum era on up through the present day. If you were alive in the 8-bit years, you've probably played one of his games: Llamatron, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Gridrunner and Idris Alpha were among the better-known ones. If you were one of the 30 people to buy an Atari Jaguar, you probably bought his "Tempest 2000" and "Defender 2000" cartridges. And if you own an Xbox 360, you've also seen his work: the builtin music visualizer is his creation. His current project is an XBox Live Arcade game temporarily titled "Space Giraffe", which is an attempt to bring the classic Atari game Tempest...

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[rmatheso]

Nice to see Jeff Minter go over his career like that and give some insight towards his philosophy on game-making. I've wrapped Space Giraffe and the game is really good once you figure out how the game works.

[gowans007]

Really enjoyed this talk, informative & entertaining, really glad people like Jeff are in the game industry with their own ideas & experiments they want to push forward and evolving gameplay & game creation into other avenues.

Great watch & really looking forward to playing Space Giraffe on Wednesday.

[cooljerk]

Jeff Minter and Manfred Trenz, two of the most genius independent developers of all time. I would give just about anything to trip acid with Mr. Minter. I bow before his greatness.

[thesociabulls]

Absolutely brilliant, great video! We'd love to meet Jeff to shake his hand!

[stankwho]

DYAD looks awful like a Jeff Minter game dont it??

[Winkle ink]

I loved Meta galactic Llamas battle at the edge of time. Pity he didn't show it.

[GMLscripts]

Fascinating video with a brilliant man and a dismal transcript.

[lostsheep01]

Jeff Minter = Legend

[TheSeekerOfKnowledge]

Jeff Minter is really lucky for not having being sued by Atari, it sure look like Tempest

[Alevamltd]

@kitwalker2006

Since when did a game, or ANYTHING have to be original to be good?

[robzeduk]

What game is better? I also play other types of games - but that's not what Jeff does - he does fast, graphically rich arcade games very well.

[robzeduk]

I don't think so - there are plenty of innovations in his games. There are only a handful of styles of game - what he does is innovate to make his games very playable. I, for one, appreciate the huge amount effort and care of his games.