Jeff Minter proudly points to a framed picture of a half-goat, half-man hybrid on the wall of his Welsh farmhouse. “That’s the original artwork for the cover of Ancipital done by Steinar Lund. People talk about images created by AI but it’s nothing compared to sitting down with an actual artist who knows what the fuck they’re doing, talking about your vision for the game over a couple of spliffs and they go away and come up with something excellent like that.”
We are not talking over a couple of spliffs but we have just had a shot of baijiu, a Chinese liquor-come-paint stripper, which may explain why we wonder aloud if Jeff actually posed for the painting, given there’s a certain similarity to the Minter profile. “No, but I can see the resemblance,” he grins. “This big, shaggy, smelly, goatee creature.”
The inspiration for the star of Llamasoft’s final release of 1984 actually came from literature. Jeff was a huge fan of Brian Aldiss’ , a science-fiction series set on a planet where humans and Ancipitals battle for supremacy. Jeff even made enquiries about an official tie-in with the books but soon got the impression this would be a lengthy as well as costly negotiation. “Luckily, ancipital is a real word so they didn’t own it,” he explains. “It means something like ‘double-edged’ in reference to ‘horns’, so I thought, ‘Yeah, we can use that!’”
