Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is a fitting tribute to a gaming icon

Around six months ago, the retro specialists at Digital Eclipse released the first edition of its new collection, the Gold Master Series.

Based on the fantastic ‘interactive museum’ concept solidified in its exceptional Atari 50 compilation, each volume in the Gold Master Series offers a digital, playable timeline dedicated to a particular game or creator.

Volume 1, The Making of Karateka, focused mainly on the groundbreaking 1984 martial arts action game created by Jordan Mechner before he found greater fame with Prince of Persia.

In our Making of Karateka review, we called it “a powerful statement of intent for what promises to be a superb series of interactive documentaries”. This intent has now been carried out again, and the results the second time around are just as impressive.

Volume 2 of the Gold Master Series is Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, and as the title suggests it’s based on the work of one of the UK’s most creative, fascinating and downright likeable game designers.

As with the previous edition and Atari 50 before it, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story presents the player with a group of timelines, each covering a different chapter in Minter’s career.

The only real criticism we had of The Making of Karateka was that because it was mainly focused on a single game, if players didn’t click with Karateka itself then they would miss out a little. Here the issue appears to be the opposite problem.

The Making of Karateka had 14 pieces of software to choose from, but because some were prototypes and alternate versions of the same game that really only amounted to about four games. This time there are 42 pieces of software, covering 33 separate games (some have multiple versions, such as the C64 and Atari 8-bit versions of Hover Bovver).

Whereas the previous edition provided extremely deep dives on Karateka and the other couple of games Mechner had released before it, this time there’s a slight leaning more towards quantity than quality, with a lot of games suddenly appearing on the timeline with no warning. You play them, have little context beyond the manual, then the game is abandoned for the next.

Naturally, this isn’t the case for everything, and Minter’s more important and popular titles – usually anything involving camels or llamas, or his fascinating light synthesisers – get much more attention, with design documents and occasionally interview clips, all of which are offshoots from the upcoming Minter documentary Heart of Neon.

Our main disappointment is that the story essentially ends with the release of Tempest 2000 in 1994, and doesn’t really cover any of Minter’s work beyond this stage, other than in a 5-minute video at the end of the timeline.

While it’s clear that a combination of emulation complexity and licensing issues would have made it practically impossible to include playable versions of some of Minter’s later games, it would still have been nice to see another timeline based on his work in the 21st century, from the Neon visualiser built into the Xbox 360, to XBLA game Space Giraffe, to more recent titles like TxK, Tempest 4000 or Akka Arrh.

To be clear though, us pointing out what isn’t here doesn’t denigrate the quality of what actually is included. There are still many hours of fascinating and entertaining content to be found in this package, and some of the stuff included made this writer gasp.

Most notable of these is a demo for a game Minter was working on for the infamous Konix Multi-System, a UK console that was never released. To be able to actually play a Konix game some 35 years after the system was announced is mindblowing for a retro enthusiast.

“To be able to actually play a Konix game some 35 years after the system was announced is mindblowing for a retro enthusiast.”

The emulation of each game is as flawless as you would expect from a Digital Eclipse title, and the addition of quality of life features is welcome. The vast majority of these games were designed for home computers but the fiddliness of menus requiring keyboard presses and the like is all handled in bespoke ways for each title so that everything just feels perfectly fine using a controller.

As someone well versed in Minter’s impact and legacy, this writer is delighted that this software exists to pay tribute to a man whose creativity is matched only by his passion for this medium. Anyone unfamiliar with Minter’s work will be in love with the man and his mindset by the time they reach the end of the last timeline.

As such, even though Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story may not be the complete Jeff Minter story, the chapters of his life which are covered are done so with a level of respect that it’s difficult to do anything other than recommend it for anyone interested in retro gaming. Its virtues may be different to those of The Making of Karateka, but they’re virtues nonetheless.