25 Facts About Jeff Minter

Jeff Minter was born on 22 April 1962 and is an English video game designer and programmer who often goes by the name Yak.

Jeff Minter is the founder of software house Llamasoft and has created dozens of games during his career, which began in 1981 with games for the ZX80.

Jeff Minter's works include the music visualisation program Neon which is built into the Xbox 360 console, and the video games Gridrunner, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Tempest 2000, and Polybius.

Jeff Minter wrote the game Deflex for the Commodore PET in 1979.

In 1981 Jeff Minter started independently writing and selling video games for the ZX80, the first machine he owned.

Jeff Minter formed a partnership with his mother, Hazel Minter.

Jeff Minter's first Llamasoft game was a Defender clone for the VIC-20 called Andes Attack.

Jeff Minter went on to develop a number of games for the Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit computers, and Atari ST which were marketed by word of mouth and magazine advertisements.

In 1989, Jeff Minter helped in the production of the Konix Multisystem console.

Jeff Minter followed it with Defender 2000 on the Jaguar, a remake of the 1981 arcade game.

Jeff Minter produced the Virtual Light Machine for the Jaguar CD add-on.

Jeff Minter was involved in writing this game for Lionhead Studios throughout 2003.

In 2007 Jeff Minter released Space Giraffe, an action video game with similarities to Tempest.

In 2010, frustrated with the delays surrounding the release of his titles, Jeff Minter was keen to return to a style of game development where games could be produced and released quickly.

Jeff Minter then announced his intention to abandon mobile development due to lack of discoverability, low turnover, and the dominance of free-to-play and video game clones; he ultimately declared that, after accounting for his time, the Minotaur Project made a net loss.

Jeff Minter stated on Twitter than "Returning to iOS would be like returning to the scene of a mugging" and "I would advise any dev valuing integrity and sanity to just get the hell out".

At the beginning of 2015, Jeff Minter was threatened with legal action by Atari, claiming that TxK was too similar to Tempest 2000 - a game that Jeff Minter himself wrote, but Atari owned the rights to.

The game features extensive support for the PlayStation VR headset, based on Jeff Minter's experience building the unreleased VR version of TxK.

In March 2018, Jeff Minter announced that the framework for the Minotaur Project had been ported to the PlayStation 4 and stated an intention to release enhanced versions of the Minotaur Project games as console games in bundles under the name Minotaur Arcade.

Jeff Minter revisited the enhanced Minotaur Arcade framework to produce an original game, Moose Life, released on Steam in August 2020 and on Playstation 4 in February 2021.

In December 2022, Jeff Minter announced that he had been contracted to produce a complete and up-to-date version of Atari's abandoned 1982 prototype arcade machine Akka Arrh, the original version of which had become available to the wider public as part of the recently published collection Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.

Jeff Minter appeared in the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, released in December 2018.

The film is based around the 1980s video game industry in the United Kingdom; Minter played Jerome F Davies, the author of the titular Bandersnatch novel, who murdered his wife.

Jeff Minter contributed to the documentary film From Bedrooms to Billions.

Jeff Minter appears extremely briefly as a background character in Ashens and the Polybius Heist.