The black screen has a single white dot at its centre.
Blocks of colour fan out, moving from pink to purple to cyan.
The light creates shapes, but what are these shapes?
Starbursts, nebula, volcanic eruptions.
Maybe that’s it.
This is Psychedelia, from 1984.
That shift, from the arcade games he had made prior to this, to something like Psychedlia?
Well, ‘shift’ is the wrong word, for starters.
Leap won’t do it either.
It’s like teleportation.
He was doing one thing, and now here he is all of a sudden doing something else.
The end result is impossible to describe without a certain degree of mutual exclusivity.
Oh, of course he did this.
The Jeff Minter Story sees gaming’s great digital Romantic given the Gold Master treatment.
This series, still thrillingly new, is Digital Eclipse’s latest take on game preservation.
And the context shifts from one volume to the next.
The most recent Gold Master collection looked at Karateka, the forerunner to Prince of Persia.
Karateka’s story unfolded in a manner that, I now realise, provided an insight into its creator.
Minter is so incredibly different.
It reminds me a little of the effect you get from reading a Philip K. Dick story omnibus.
You see the master returning to a theme, but changing the variables to make something distinct each time.
When this is arcade games we’re talking about, the rewards are immediate.
Psychedelia is a thing I struggle to pull myself away from now.
It’s not the only light synth on here, but it’s my favourite.
I have fallen into this game over the last few days and I refuse to come out.
I may even put on The Floyd myself.
Then there’s Laser Zone.
I like the Vic-20 version personally.
I didn’t know about it, and yet it could have been released yesterday.
Ditto the sort-of-sequel Hellgate in which - of course - you now move four turrets.
1984, that one.
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story accessibility options
Button remapping.
All the games are presented beautifully, with control guides, loads of additional information, and swift loading.
But this is not just a games collection.
It really is a story, the story of a brilliant man who made brilliant games.
I always knew Minter’s imagination was shaped by games like Robotron and Tempest.
But how about this?
A copy of Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story was provided for review by Digital Eclipse.
