News Flash: Jeff Minter is Nobody. Film At Never.
July 8, 2006 4:51 pm Gaming, General Interest, Miscellaneous, RantsWhy does anyone listen to Jeff Minter?
Okay. So the attention whoring du jour is Sony’s high price on the PS3. Everyone knew it was coming. I nailed the price on the nose a year and a half ago. Now, Jeff Minter is calling Sony arrogant. Hi, reality calling: who the fuck is Jeff Minter? The BBC seems to be under the misimpression that someone who made a low-quality clone of an Atari game is someone who even remotely matters.
You want to talk arrogant? Let’s talk about a shareware author who wants to talk down to the undisputed commercial champion of gaming for a pricing decision. You see how rich you aren’t on video gaming, Jeff? That’s why you don’t get to call a two hundred billion dollar game empire’s money decisions arrogant: because your money decisions are virtually nonexistant.
Arrogant
One entry found for arrogant.
Main Entry: ar·ro·gant
Pronunciation: -g&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin arrogant-, arrogans, present participle of arrogare
1 : exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one’s own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner
That whole pot-and-kettle thing comes to mind. He might as well chastize Warren Buffett.
And, BBC? Jeff Minter isn’t famous at all, much less for those crappy games. Way to show how thoroughly out of touch you are. Edge only published Jeff Minter’s comments because Edge is broadly ignored by people who are actually in the industry, and is desperate for names to drop. Edge is not actually respected in any way; it’s little better than a self-important group of nobodies trying to pretend to have their finger on the pulse of a crowd they don’t appear to know anything about. The only reason the magazine exists is that they have the byline “videogame culture,” which is apparently smooth enough to fool the BBC into thinking they have a half a clue what they’re talking about.
Let’s give a sense of scale of how much Jeff Minter doesn’t matter, because I’m sure there are a lot of people going “well who the hell are you?” I’ll tell you who I am: I’m someone who’s actually involved in this industry and this social scene.
Jeff Minter’s crappy Atari game clone Llamatron, which basically grafts Nullsoft’s llama joke onto Atari’s successful if simple shooter, gets 21,900 hits on google. His Tempest 2000 gets 81,000 (and another 3300 as Tempest 2k.) Tempest 3000 doesn’t even get a thousand hits between its two namings. Gridrunner++ gets another 12,800. Much like Llamatron, Jeff didn’t invent the Tempest format either; that was Dave Theurer, someone who actually has talent, skill and deserves fame. Gridrunner is just a crappy Centipede clone. Jeff Minter has never generated a new game; he just steals other people’s work, changes its name and pretends he’s a legend. (Amazingly, on his ego stroking about page, he brags about his originality. Every game he’s written is a bad clone. One wonders if he even knows how full of shit he is.)
“But he’s got a hundred thousand hits between four games! Surely that’s impressive!” Nonsense. My Nintendo DS Wifi Bounty alone has more than twice the hits on just its full name than everything Jeff Minter has ever done put together, and it was for three thousand whopping dollars. You can beat Jeff Minter’s career on half the price of a used Toyota. And this is the BBC and Edge’s idea of an expert.
This is a hint for the next BBC writer that thinks they should just listen to any pompous nobody who has an axe to grind and an ego to swing: just because someone’s web page says “video game legend” doesn’t mean they actually are. Go to a video game store some time, and ask who Satoru Iwata, Gumpei Yokoi and Sid Meier are.
The first person who knows all three? Ask them who Jeff Minter is. Their blank stare will tell you everything you need to know.
Once upon a time, the BBC was famous for its high quality research, unbiased stories, investigation of sources and its resistance to transparently obvious self promotion. These days I guess they just rip stories off from other papers. The least you guys could do would be to rip stories off from reputable rags.
July 15th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Jeff Minter *was* one of the most famous games developers in the 1980s in Britain. If the BBC researcher is in his/her 30s, he will most likely have heard of him, along with Matthew Smith (Manic Miner), Archer McLean (Dropzone) and Tony Crowther (Loco), and musicians like Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway. Foreigners like Meier, Iwata and Yokoi didn’t register in the UK press in the 1980s, although Eugene Jarvis, Ed Logg and maybe Bill Hogue would have. I think even Toru Iwatani was unknown at the time due to namco’s secrecy. Jeff would have been talked about almost every month in the mid 1980s magazines.
Edge *was* the respected games magazine (it had all the developer job adverts in its back pages) until GamesTM stole a march on it recently. But they were always up themselves. AFAIK there are *no* respectable consumer gamer magazines published in the USA, but Game Developer is good from the developer point of view (as is Develop in the UK of course).
September 7th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
You don’t consider Jeff’s early visualisation/VLM works to be original?
Several of Jeff’s original games include Batalyx, Ancipital and Mama Llama.
Jeff is well known in many circles, and recently his company, Llamasoft, developed the visualisation technology within every Xbox 360, known as ‘Neon’. Today, Llamasoft is working on a game targeted for Xbox Live Arcade known under the working title ‘Space Giraffe’.
On Google, a search for “DS Wi-fi Bounty” as titled on your website returns 1,480 pages. A search for Llamatron returns 27,500. A search for “Space Giraffe” Minter returns 25,700.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22DS+Wi-fi+Bounty%22&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=llamatron&btnG=Search&meta=
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22space+giraffe%22+minter&btnG=Search&meta=
October 19th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Archer Maclean is another one who made (admittedly good) clones of arcade machines then waves the “genius game designer and industry legend” flag.
IK and IK+ were Karate Champ, Dropzone was Defender, snoker was well snooker.
November 7th, 2006 at 6:59 am
You might be best off making a counter-argument to the things Minter said, rather than simply slagging him off. If you have a valid objection to the things he said, then show them, rather than putting yourself in bad light. Someones number of Google hits is in no way evidence of importance. Using your system I find that Christina Aguilera is 8.18 times more important that Karl-Heinz Stockhausen.
Aguilera scores: 5,310,000
Stockhausen scores: 649,000
Brilliant.
A couple of quotes for you:
“My Nintendo DS Wifi Bounty alone has more than twice the hits on just its full name than everything Jeff Minter has ever done put together”
“Arrogant
One entry found for arrogant.
Main Entry: ar·ro·gant
Pronunciation: -g&nt
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin arrogant-, arrogans, present participle of arrogare
1 : exaggerating or disposed to exaggerate one’s own worth or importance often by an overbearing manner”
Btw. Regardless of what you might think about Minter’s games, his light-synth work and in particular his use of feedback textures has been pretty influential in visualisation software.
March 27th, 2007 at 1:07 am
You are F’ing retarded. Jeff Minter to this day has written better visualizations than anything else out there. I seriously doubt you have any idea what it takes to write and debug a game or other program. Would you say Linus Torvalds has a worthless opinion because he isn’t rich from his works? In case you dont know, he is the originator of the Linux kernel, which is most likely running this site where you slam Jeff Minter.
April 2nd, 2007 at 2:03 pm
Jim:
If you’d bother to read what you’re talking about, or any of the rest of the blog, you’d discover that I am a commercial game programmer, so suggesting that I don’t know what goes into a commercial game is a bit silly. Also, if you’d bother looking around that kernel you’re talking about, you’d find a lot of my code. Furthermore, my website runs on BSD.
All that you seem to actually have done is slung an insult, made a transparent mistake, then gone off on a non-sequitor.