Jeff Minter: Sony 'Arrogant' Concerning The PS3

In reports originally printed by UK game magazine Edge and relayed by BBC News, seminal British programmer and game designer Jeff Minter (Tempest 2000) has voiced his opinion of Sony's PlayStation 3 console following its E3 launch, going so far as to call the company "incredibly arrogant". Minter's thoughts on the PlayStation 3, which were published in his regular column in the UK video game magazine Edge, included his feeling that Sony seems “absolutely certain that even when they say it's going to be considerably more expensive than existing consoles... nevertheless us eager customers will rush out in droves to buy it because it's, hey, a new PlayStation.” Veteran coder Minter is the founder of development house Llamasoft, which has produced cult titles such as Attack of the Mutant Camels for the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers, as well as Gridrunner and Sheep in Space. Minter also produced the 1994 remake of Dave Theurer's 1981 classic Tempest for the Atari Jaguar with Tempest 2000. His most recent work includes an unfortunately cancelled GameCube title in conjunction with Lionhead Studios named Unity, the sound-to-light synthesizer called Neon which is built in to all Xbox 360 consoles, and Minter is currently listed as an Xbox Live Arcade developer, though he has not explicitly revealed what title he is working on for the system. Interestingly, Minter is not alone in questioning the price, as a recent survey of Japanese developers by Japanese magazine Ge-Maga found that an overwhelming 90.29 percent of those participants feel that PlayStation 3 is priced too high.