How Jeff Minter Met The 360

The Guardian Gamesblog has a piece on Jeff Minter's hookup with the Xbox 360. From the article: "It basically happened because a certain well-connected friend of mine really liked what we were doing here with VLM3 on the Gamecube, and brought someone from MS here to see. He in turn got very enthusiastic, and went back to MS and began bending ears. It took a fair bit of prodding and sending of demos but eventually it progressed to the point where I got hold of a devkit. Once we had proper live 360 code running it turned from 'maybe' to 'definitely!'."

The irony

[baldass_newbie]

From the article: "We have been using Xbox360 alpha dev kits (which are based on a dual-G5 platform)."

No kidding. Too funny.

Re:The irony

[amliebsch]

I don't get it.

Re:The irony

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest Apple development platform is x86 and the latest Microsoft dev platform is G5. Get it?

Re:The irony

[karnal]

And the sad thing about that is you probably never will.

Re:The irony

[amliebsch]

You do know that Microsoft doesn't sell computers, right? So they would have had to purchase the PPC dev kits from somebody, and it just so happens that Apple does (for now) indeed produce a fine PPC computer. Maybe it would be embarassing if they were using Apple's software, but they weren't. Maybe it's ironic/funny in some alternate universe when people use the right tool for the job, but not in mine.

Re:The irony

[zulux]

You do know that Microsoft doesn't sell computers, right?

WTF is an XBOX then?

It boots a shitty version of NT, and can boot Linux. Looks like a computer to me.

Re:The irony

[defy god]

you do know they have toasters booting linux nowadays right? ;)

MS And The Dreamcast 360

[Anonymous Coward]

It's where all hip burnouts and has-beens go to die...

Rare...try to find anyone from the original dev teams walking the halls...

Bungie...getting bought out by MS hasn't changed anything...nope...not a thing...

Minter...was somewhat cool back in the ST days, now...

Landing in xbox land is basically letting the console world know you just don't give a shit anymore.

Re:MS And The Dreamcast 360

[orkysoft]

I hear ya. Llamatron on the ST made sure I stayed the hell away from drugs!

Re:MS And The Dreamcast 360

[rAiNsT0rm]

Word.

and don't forget Molyneux, Fable being an Xbox exclusive made no difference and in fact hurt sales figures severely.

Xbox 360: "When You've Given Up Hope Of a Real Game Development Career!" Now with more hard to develop for cores so your games can suck better! (tm)(r)

The real reason is obvious

[xenocide2]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2000-10- 23&res=l [penny-arcade.com]

it pains me to even

[torpor]

consider that Jeff Minter .. is .. working .. for .. / .. with .. Microsoft .. on .. a .. potentially cool .. gaming .. platform.

arrrggh!!! fuck embracing and extending the reality bubbles bill, i just wanna cry!

Re:Who cares?

[snuf23]

If you don't know who Jeff Minter is... you won't care anyway!

Re:Who cares?

[gmezero]

Aside from his earlier C64 work and Llammatron for the Amiga, he's main claim to fame was the infamous Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar. The game frequently also called "the only reason to own a Jaguar". He also did the Virtual Light Machine (spectrum analyzer) for CD playback that was built into the Atari Jaguar CD unit. It was pretty impressive mind you, and was a staple of many a DJ's video arsenal for years afterwards. But, this was really the peak of is his career, and I hate to say it, he's been ridi

Woohoo!

[metamatic]

Here's hoping Jeff's Xbox 360 projects herald the same kind of explosive growth for that platform as his Nuon and Jaguar projects did for those platforms.

Re:Woohoo!

[metamatic]

Yes, it actually saddens me that none of Jeff Minter's post-Atari ST stuff has been on platforms I use.

Ahh memories

[lorelorn]

Jeff Minter's Revenge of the Mutant Camels was one of the first computer games that really grabbed me, and it was a big part of me deciding to get a Commodore 64 back in the day.

Re:Ahh memories

[Keeper]

For me, it was Llamatron on the Atari ST ...

Would be more interesting

[Corpus_Callosum]

This would be a lot more interesting if he actually got real Xbox360 hardware instead of the DualG5 kits. As it stands, this article is only causually interesting, insofar as 'the shader performance of our lightshow was great' goes...