Jeff Minter: Llamatron and Revenge of the Mutant Camels

[Katsumoto]

#9931

Hey guys

You may be familiar with Jeff Minter, famous for “ruminant-based arcade shooters”, or at least you may know his massive hits Gridrunner and Tempest 2000 (or more recently, Space Giraffe).

But he also released at least two of his early 90s games for MS-DOS – Llamatron and Revenge of the Mutant Camels. The first is a multi-directional shooter (based on Robotron) and the latter a horizontal scrolling shooter (loosely based on the 1982 arcade game the Empire Strikes Back – replace AT-ATs with Mutant Camels, lol).

Could be fun to do some high-score chasing with these two one month.

[sorceress]

#9932

I feel like these were very small games. 5 minutes and you’ve pretty much seen all there is to see. It’s just high score tables that keeps one playing beyond that.

As much as he is celebrated as a game creator on the commodore machines (and the 8-bit era in general), I’m not sure his games hold up very well retrospectively, and are not something I’d ever associate with DOS and PCs, even if they did have later DOS releases.

[Katsumoto]

#9933

Oo, have to agree to disagree on the games not holding up very well! Had an absolute blast on the recent Jeff Minter Collection release going through all the 80s hits.

I definitively associate him with MS-DOS as these were the first games of his I played, and indeed all I knew him for until much later (when Space Giraffe made him famous all over again). Though the fact that most would not even know he did any DOS games imo makes these all the more interesting to look at for the club.

But yes, they are all fairly bite sized – but we did have a “small games month” once before so these would do nicely in a similar one. Will have to think of some other arcade games that might complement these ones!

[Coops]

#9947

I really enjoyed his iOS version of Gridrunner and then all his follow up iOS games, including one that was like Llamatron (Minotron 2112). Unfortunately they’re all pulled from the App Store now.

I’ll have to have a look at what he’s done on DOS.

[Pix]

#9948

The DOS Tempest 2000 port is excellent. We could do a Jeff Minter month with all three at some point I guess.

I think that’s all of them from him that made it to DOS but it’s not an easy thing to search on Mobygames.