Jeff Minter

Jeff Minter (born 22 April 1962) is an English video game designer and programmer who often goes by the nickname Yak. He co-founded independent video game developer Llamasoft in 1982 and was the sole game designer and programmer until Ivan Zorzin started being co-credited in 2008. Minter has created dozens of games, starting in 1981 for the ZX80, then later the ZX Spectrum, VIC-20, Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit computers, Amiga, Atari ST, Jaguar, and other systems. A majority of Minter's projects are shoot 'em ups, often based on games from the golden age of arcade video games such as Defender, Tempest, and Robotron: 2084. Minter has evolved a game design style which combines psychedelic visuals, references to ruminants (especially llamas, sheep, and camels), and quirky audio samples. Minter's works include Gridrunner (1982) and Tempest 2000 (1994), both of which he has revisited and expanded into new releases multiple times, Attack of the Mutant Camels (1983), and Polybius (2017). He developed a series of music visualization programs, beginning with Psychedelia in 1984 and culminating in Neon, which is built into the Xbox 360 console. In 2011–2013, Minter and Zorzin released nine games for iOS, inspired by 1980s computers and video game consoles, under the banner The Minotaur Project. Many Llamasoft games are self-published, but Minter has also had games released by Human Engineered Software, multiple incarnations of Atari, and other publishers. Many of his games are collected in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story released in 2024 for Windows and consoles.