Jeff Minter Threatens To Abandon Game Development

Cult UK developer Jeff Minter has spoken of his despair at low sales of Xbox Live Arcade title Space Giraffe in an online blog, although he has retreated from earlier comments that suggested he might leave video games development entirely as a result. Well known in the UK for arcade style shoot ‘em-ups such as Llamatron and Attack of the Mutant Camels, Minter is also renowned for a number of remakes of Atari classic Tempest and for a series of light synthesizer programs – including the Neon visualization tool for the Xbox 360. Writing on his online blog [warning: contains strong language] on Tuesday, Minter commented: “Not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.” “OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, s**** arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga,” he continued. “We'll shut up trying to do anything new then. Sorry for even trying.” Following negative reaction to his comments from online readers, Minter last night added to the blog by saying: “I'm not going to be writing about game development here anymore after this. Yes, I had a bit of a rant the other night because frankly yes, it is a bit disappointing to see a repackaged MAME ROM doing much better than original content, but hey, that's how it goes.” Minter added that he was still invested in Xbox Live Arcade, and that his company Llamasoft had a “need” to re-use the SG framework of Space Giraffe for at least two more games. “I'm already halfway through the next one and I just want to get my head down and get on with it,” he commented.