JEO 22/46
//// Minter Overrated?
Subject:      The Minter Thing.
From:         Gareth Davies 
Date:         1997/12/16
Newsgroups:   rec.games.video.atari
Okay, here goes. I know some @$$hole is going to take personal offence
to this so let me say at the start that Jeff Minter has produced some
incredible games - I'll blow sunshine up the great man's @$$ when it's
due; still here's a very critical bashing - don't read on if you're
too precious to accept it for what it is - *just* my opinions.
First, he's been there from (almost) the very beginning - Vic20 to
Jaguar.  This is an achievement in itself. But what has he been there
with? Most of his early games were Vid Kidz inspired Centipede
rip-offs or, with name and graphic changes, copies of other peoples
creations - Gridrunner, Matric, TurboFlex, Attack of the Mutant
Camels................. (The two exceptions are the incredibly
playable Hovver Bover and the incredibly fun Colour Space/Psychadelia
- old ideas never die, they live again on the Jag!
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. Indeed, at the time when
most software companies/one man bands were creating Pac-Man and
Scramble clones Jeff Minter was filling a gap in the home computer
market - bringing 'sphincter tightening' action in to peoples homes.
There were some great games - I played Vic-20 Matrix last week on a
real Vic-20. The term incredible doesn't do justice to it - it terms
of playability, and even sound, it has a lot in common with Tempest
2000 (yes, I know it doesn't have the music.) There were some real
stinkers though - Vic-20 Deffenda was so substandard it should never
have seen the light of day. It was so bugged as to be unplayable and
when Williams - for some reason - put their foot down it was
re-released as the equally unplayable Andes Attack. I could - and did
- do better myself.
The genius of Jeff Minter lay mainly in clever marketing - pushing an
instantly recognisable and interesting icon, the Llama and hippy. It
also rested in game design in the most general sense: ideas. As
programs most of Minter's work was *very* simple - it had to be to fit
into a 3 1/2 K VIC- 20!! But it was also *very* formulaic - again,
there's nothing necessarily wrong with this; it was the Llamasoft
trademark and, unarguably, it worked.  But there were programmers at
the time who were pushing the boundaries of the 8 bit machines. Paul
Woakes, another one man band, through Mercenary - and the data disks -
for Atari and C64 created what was an entirely new gaming experience.
In terms of marketing, the data disks were also a new arrival. My
opinion of Jeff Minter as a programmer took a nose dive when I read a
magazine interview with him in which he explained why Revenge of the
Mutant Camels was not possible on the Atari XL: the Atari XL didn't
have as many sprites/PM graphics as the C64. I had never heard that
explanation as a reason for a programmer's inability to port a C64
game to Atari XL!
My point is this: to put it bluntly as a programmer Minter is limited
and *very* overrated. His creations for the Atari ST suggest that he
never really made the transition, **as a one man band**, from 8 to 16
bit programmer (just my opinion remember!) The atrociously unplayable
ST version of Revenge of the Mutant Camels was an insult - an insult
because it attempted to prick the shareware conscience. Llamatron
was/is an incredible ST game - no less incredible for being a *very*
simple piece of programming. The extremely playable, retro, ST version
of Defender harked back to the old ideas - nothing technically
impressive; just plain old Defender. It wasn't a huge success and
achieved only mediocre review scores.  It was perhaps unfortunate that
it was released as the ST was well and truly on the wane. As a
comparison Paul Woakes seemed to make the transition more easily with
his technically impressive 16 bit version of Mercenary - Damocles.
On to the Jaguar. Ironically, the success of Tempest 2000 says a lot
about what was wrong with the Jaguar, or more accurately, Atari's
support for it.  I remember, in 1994, there being a lot of discussion
in this group about the limited nature of the Jaguar development
system - it put too much of a burden on developers to create there own
development libraries; developers didn't have enough experience with
the Jaguar to create their own optimised code - it would take time to
learn how to program a multi-processor system whose CPU wasn't really
*the* CPU. (PlayStation developers have faced simialr problems but
have had time and support to create their own libraries.) I also
remember reading, in this group, the report of someone - don't know
who - who had been given an Atari guided tour of the Jag. Whilst
playing about with the software he managed to find some interesting
looking effects/development libraries which the Atari engineers hadn't
shown him.  Immediately, the engineers interrupted him and asked him
to stop what he was doing. Jeff Minter replied in this group that
those libraries were development tools written by Atari engineers
specifically for him. This is interesting because it suggests that the
creation of Tempest 2000 may have relied heavily on a specialist
development system not available to other developers - similar to the
mail-merge method of programming favoured by many PlayStation
developers?! This is, of course, speculation - NDA's mean that we'll
probably never know the truth but it does suggest that Atari had some
pretty effective development libraries which they were not prepared to
share with other developers. Given the poor software quality of the
standard Jag development kit and the difficulties faced by programmers
writing optimised Jag code, Atari's failure to share the tools is
incredible.
Anyway, back to "The Minter thing." Personally I was underwhelmed by
Tempest 2000 - and the PS version. Not really my type of game to be
honest although I can appreciate that it was/is an incredibly playable
game and, with the exception of Doom and Iron Soldier, probably the
best Jaguar game ever released. The point is that it shouldn't have
been. It didn't offer much new in terms of graphical effects - video
feedback was the game's fingerprint. Again, there's nothing wrong with
this but it needs to be pointed out that in terms of programming
tricks things hadn't progressed *much* since Atari XL Attack of the
Mutant Camels. I'm not saying that Tempest 2000 is a bad game; it
isn't.
A couple of weeks ago I saw Defender 2000 for the first time.
Surprise and dissapointment. Surprise that Atari could have released
such a lacklustre game at the very time they needed to pull a rabbit
out of the hat - the change from CD format didn't help much; no
multimedia "experience" then.  Dissapointment that, after all the
hype, the 2000 version was basically plain old Defender with parallax
scrolling and that the original version was nothing like, well, the
*original* version.
I think Minter's involvement with Project X needs to be viewed against
the backdrop I've outlined. His main contribution should be as a games
designer - dealing with (limited) ideas - rather than as a games
programmer. Perhaps as a programmer managing a team of more
technically accomplished programmers? Certainly not as a one man band
- that would spell disaster for Project X. Competing against the pure
genius of Namco and Nintendo's Mr. Miyamoto (sic?) is a hard task -
Minter, as a programmer, is quite simply not up to it.
Gareth Davies.
... The trouble with getting a life is making the payments.
--- JetMail 0.99beta22
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