Mike Mika first met Jeff Minter at CES in Chicago in 1994. He has pictorial proof, gesturing over Zoom to a photo on the wall behind him, marking what was clearly a significant moment in the life of Digital Eclipse’s studio head.
Having grown up with a Commodore 64, with Minter’s Gridrunner proving a formative gaming experience, Mika was initially too scared to talk to his hero. He needn’t have worried. “It turns out he’s one of the nicest guys on the planet,” he recalls. As both a fan and a budding developer, Mika says the encounter set certain expectations as he sought a way into the industry. “It was like: hey, if everybody’s like Jeff, this is gonna be a great place to be.” He breaks into a broad grin. “Turns out nobody’s like Jeff.”
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, the second entry in Digital Eclipse’s Gold Master Series, combines the intimacy of its predecessor, The Making Of Karateka, with the scope of the widely acclaimed Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration. Among the package’s many accomplishments, it proves the veracity of Mika’s assertion – there really is no one quite like Jeff Minter – and effectively repays the kindness its subject showed him 30 years prior. The two have kept in touch, on and off, ever since, Digital Eclipse editorial director Chris Kohler tells us. “They’ve basically been trying to find something cool to do together. And this was it.”
Of course, this is more than just a matter of belatedly returning a favour. What made Project Alpaca (as it was known internally) so appealing for Digital Eclipse was a sense that, for many – especially outside of the UK, Minter’s home for most of his life – this is something of an untold story. Or at least a comparatively little-known one. The interactive timeline spans 13 years of Llamasoft – from 1981’s (coded in BASIC for Sinclair’s ZX81) to 1994’s The latter, Kohler says, marks a natural endpoint. Not just because that’s “the last game that we could
