Jeff Minter

Author of many classic 8 bit games, such as
Llamatron and Revenge of the mutant camels, and later Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar.

Worryingly obsessive about ungulates such as llamas, camels, goats and sheep.

Jeff's goat, Alistair has recently died, but Flossie the most beautiful sheep in the world is alive and well.

He's currently working on Tempest 3000 for VM Labs' Nuon console/set-top box type thing.

Also known as the YaK.

Those of us who grew up in the 80s delight what was UK computing, the Spectrum, the Amstrad, or the Commodore 64, will recognise the name of Jeff Minter with delight. Jeff has been the cause of some much missed homework and the creator of some of the weirdest, time consuming, eye bending games with sheep cameos.

Game titles such as "Attack of the Mutant Camels" and "Sheep in Space" give you some idea of the mind behind the madness. Jeff is often described as "a long-haired, Pink Floyd-loving, sheep-raising, curry-eating gaming guru."

Starting off with his own company, Llamasoft he developed for the UK 8 bit market. Moving from there to Atari he developed for the ST, the Jaguar and their relatively unknown Falcon.

As he's now a noder here, he's probably the best person to correct and update this :) For those of you who want to see the sort of games listening to Pink Floyd causes you can download some from his web page at http://www.magicnet.net/~yak/index.html

Jeff Minter is also the kiss of death for emerging consoles, having provided launch titles for no less than three failures - an updated version of Defender for the Konix Multisystem, 'Tempest 2000' for the Atari Jaguar, and most recently 'Tempest 3000' for the Nuon. Not to mention his work for the Atari Falcon, and the fact that he was an avid proponent of the Atari ST (for which 'Llamatron' and his interesting video light synthesiser 'Trip-a-Tron' were originally written).

'Llamatron' was an interesting experiment in the then-novel field of shareware (at least in the UK, especially for a commercial-quality game); after aquiring it from a PD library, you were supposed to send £5 to Jeff Minter in exchange for a poster and kudos. Unlike the majority of subsequent shareware titles, it was not crippled in any way. I played it endlessly and, er, didn't pay.

Jeff Minter himself is the archetypal hippie programmer, a rare breed in the UK. He was born in 1962 and likes Hawkwind, The Ozric Tentacles, llamas, sheep, goats and chicken vindaloo. He currently lives in Wales. He was very briefly a member of Everything2 - as The Yak, he posted a few times in November 2000 - but it would appear he is now long-gone.