Breaking News: Jeff Minter does something!

April 25, 2006, 11:39 AM

by brandon, via Llamasoft -
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For all those out there who think we're japanese fetishists who just have a wank everytime hideo kojima talks about what book he's reading now, witness our undying devotion to Jeff Minter! We'll give ourselves a good rubdown any time he does something too! The Tempest 2000/VLM/Neon/Unity creator is working on a new game for the 360. He's got the particle system going, and took some screen caps on his livejournal. Therein, he puts some odd words pairing animals and their emissions. One of these is Capybara spunk, which reminds us that our pals at Capybara Games have a really neat new project coming up, which I can't actually reveal, but involves persons that eat the flesh of others, in a genre you wouldn't expect. Regardless, back to Minter. His new game hasn't really been properly defined, but he's talked about it just a bit, starting with how he feels expectations will be.

"Finally starting to get a grip on this new game. Always takes a while at first and there are times of floating around with that feeling of "I promised I would make an excellent game but I'm not feeling it yet", but it has ever been thus. In truth it's always been that way. It was exactly that way when I said I'd do Tempest 2000. I was certain the entire Jaguar community would laugh and point at me because of the crapness of what I'd made."

Whoops. Now I wish that when I met him at E3 2001 (I think that was the year - he was there for the Nuon), I hadn't asked him why Tempest 3000 wasn't much better than 2000. He probably felt bad. Anyway, he then went on to mention that even though Neon did really well (that's the visualization system for the 360, if you didn't know), the fact that Unity didn't come out makes him a bit nervous. Even so, cautious optimism abounds:

"At the moment it feels like it's starting to shake down well, the initial ideas resolving into things you can actually bolt game mechanic on, really nice bits like today with the p-system work just being lovely... it's good that it feels like it's starting to slot together well. There *is* no formula for this stuff, you just have to munge things around until they feel right and then build from there. And despite everything, despite hangovers from previous projects and people like the fucking Rev whose mission is to make game designers want to slit their wrists rather than ever design a game ever again - I'm starting to feel increasingly confident about this one, it feels nice, it really does :)." Guess we'll see! Thanks to AtarianAllStar for the link.

Update! Minter has responded, specifically calling out the part about Tempest 3000 - "T3K was an *extraordinary* amount of work. It was written in the equivalent of shader assembler when there wasn't any such thing as shaders. In parallel. It isn't perfect, but I *am* proud of what it is, given the hardware I had to work with. I am sorry if I seem tetchy about it but it irks me no end if people take swipes at it because I put a hell of a lot of time and effort into that thing :)." So there you have it. Just remember kids, something you say now may may very well come back to haunt you in 5 years time!