29th July 2004, The Cow Barn, West Wales. Jeff Minter expressed surprise and delight at his nomination for the new Development Legend Award in Develop Magazine's forthcoming Industry Excellence Awards.
"I'm well chuffed," said Jeff, "I've always made games so that I can play them myself; it's always been a bonus that other people have liked them as well, and this nomination's a rather lovely bit of extra recognition. Course, I suppose Peter Molyneux will win it, but it's nice to be thought of."
Jeff founded Llamasoft in 1982 and quickly made a name for himself with a series of quirky and immensely playable 8-bit games as well as the world's first light-synth, Psychedelia. He continued into the 16-bit era, cementing his legendary status with more light-synths (Colourspace and Trip-A-Tron) and more games, most notably Llamatron, which kick-started the UK shareware market.
In the 1990s he moved to California joined Atari, creating Defender 2000 and the award-winning Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar console, as well as the Virtual Light Machine (VLM) for the Jaguar CD-Rom drive, then moved to VM Labs where he made the critically-acclaimed Tempest 3000 for the Nuon platform as well as VLM2.
Returning to Wales he produced three new shareware titles for PC and Pocket PC: Deflex, Hover Bovver 2: Grand Theft Flymo and Grid Runner ++, garnering rave reviews and helping bring him to the attention of Lionhead Studios.
The best is yet to come. Jeff is now hard at work developing Unity for Lionhead, tying together the two main strands of his work over the past twenty years: intense shooting action and mind-melting visuals.
