Depending on what era of gaming you grew up in, the name Jeff Minter could mean everything or nothing to you.
Related What’s more vital, though, is the eerily relevant story that’s woven between games. The Llamasoft collection spotlights an almost prophetic Minter who accurately predicted the endpoint of the game industry’s quest for commercialization. It’s a sobering snapshot of how we got to where we are today, even if its Atari-washed happy ending obscures the truth a bit.
A project inspired by the video game version of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and its AT-AT fights morphs into a wild arcade game about shooting an enormous camel. That later turns into Revenge of the Mutant Camels, which inverts the Star Wars formula by letting players control the giant beastie instead of attacking it. Each time Minter builds on an idea, it gets wackier, from the bafflingly bizarre Mama Llama to the fantastic Llamatron: 2112.
Also missing here is the extra interaction that made The Making of Karateka feel like such a revelation. That project featured ingenious tools that turned the development process into a hands-on museum exhibit. The Llamasoft package doesn’t include anything like that, instead laying out much of its central documentary in long Minter newsletters. Thankfully, those documents are just as engrossing as the games he wrote about in them.
If you read that quote without any context, you might think it was written today. Everything Minter discusses is applicable to the lucrative game industry in 2024; he may as well have been writing about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League or Skull and Bones. Through his writing, Minter predicts an industry where design innovation is doomed to fall to the side as studios try to recreate tried-and-true successes. That’s not how you get to Tempest 2000.
Rather than building up to Minter’s magnum opus, the final chapter reads more like a celebration of Atari history. The climax is less about Tempest 2000 and more about the Atari Jaguar. A great deal of space goes into an aside about the Konix, a failed British video game system that would pave the way for the Jaguar.