A while back, I reviewed the rather splendid interactive documentary The Making of Karateka from Digital Eclipse. A wonderful chronicle detailing the history of Jordan Mechner’s seminal game. Well, Digital Eclipse are back with another one of their awesome interactive documentaries and this time, they’re spotlighting a true British gaming legend.

“Gridrunner. Revenge of the Mutant Camels. Tempest 2000. Llamatron. In the British gaming universe of the 80s and 90s, nobody made games like Jeff Minter. Now, in a new interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse, you can play the history of one of the weirdest, wildest game developers to ever exist – a man who loved shooters and sheep, lasers and llamas.”

I have mentioned it several times on this blog, and I’ll never get tired of mentioning it, I love gaming history. I have a particular passion for British gaming history and my absolute favourite era of British gaming history is the early to mid-’80s. The time of the bedroom programmer, the maverick years and a time when unique indie devs flourished before the term ‘indie dev’ even existed. The infamous video game crash of 1983 destroyed the industry, and it took the mighty Sega and Nintendo to save it… at least that is what a great many people tend to believe. The truth is that the video game crash of ’83 really only affected North America. The rest of the world just did not care because other countries already had pretty stable gaming industries of their own.

Here in the UK, we still had the likes of Atari and gamers of a certain age (like me) even grew up playing the mighty wood-finished box that was the Atari 2600. But, we also had the microcomputer boom. While the US game industry was imploding, over here in Blighty, we had young and hungry coders making highly original games for home computers. We had a Matt Smith, we had a David Braben, we had a Malcolm Evans… we had a Jeff Minter.

When it comes to British gaming history, there are so many names that need mentioning, so many names that were and still are revered, so many names that shaped gamers (like me) at a young age. Then there’s Jeff Minter who, for me, kind of stands out there on his own. Jeff’s games were bizarre, crazy and yet, they were (mostly) also highly original and very playable. With games that had titles like Attack of the Mutant Camels, you knew you were getting something a bit ‘different’ with Jeff. But I digress, as this article is fast turning into a British gaming/Jeff Minter memory lane walk, and I’m supposed to be reviewing Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story…  which is a British gaming/Jeff Minter memory lane walk, only more interactive.

So then, exactly what do you get with Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story? Well, you get one of the finest and most enjoyable gaming documentaries that you are likely to experience. As with the previous The Making of Karateka, this covers multiple timelines. Split into four chapters and starting with a young Jeff growing up in the English town of Tadley. You learn of how Jeff taught himself to code, how he began making games on a Commodore PET using BASIC and how he eventually founded his own studio, Llamasoft. The timeline moves through the years and right up to the mighty Tempest 2000 and what Jeff Minter and Llamasoft are up to these days.

Along the way, you can interact with a wide variety of gaming goodies that cover Jeff’s career in astonishing detail. Each of the four chapters is stuffed with photos, videos, interviews, documents, handwritten notes, artwork, magazine reviews, ads and much, much more. Everything is covered, from Jeff’s early life and the days of the microcomputers of the late ’70s and early ’80s, up to Jeff’s work with the Neon game engine/light synthesiser that was used on the Xbox 360 and beyond. You can view all of this at your own leisure too. Follow the timeline from start to end in its entirety if you wish. Or you can just jump in and out at any point you like. What you get is a deep-dive into one of gaming’s most endearing and enduring game programmers and one of the pioneers of indie games, whose career has lasted several decades and is still going today.

But, it’s not all about just looking at pictures, videos, documents and whatnot because what you get with Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story are 42 of Jeff’s games to play too. Now, you don’t get 42 unique games, as there are multiple ports of some of the same titles. But it is fascinating to be able to play all of these titles in their various iterations and see the differences that the hardware brought and how Jeff’s ideas grew. From Jeff’s very early years and his making (essentially) rip-offs and clones of popular arcade hits, as a lot of programmers did back then, to his much more original titles and his fascination with llamas and camels. There are a few nice surprises along the way, such as the fact you can play the previously lost demo of Attack of the Mutant Camels, which was set to be released on the cancelled Konix Multisystem console. Plus, there’s a modern remake of one of Jeff’s best games, Gridrunner. The full game list is right here.

The games do vary in quality quite wildly. I found a few of them barely payable these days, or maybe they just didn’t feel right not playing them on their native hardware, though that never made them any less interesting to explore and learn about. But then there were other titles that I found instantly playable and as much fun now as they were decades ago. There are also games that I never had the chance to play growing up, so they were great to experience for the first time here. All of the games come with a plethora of modern-day visual options for you to tinker with so that you can get the titles looking exactly how you like on your big ‘ole screens.

Jeff Minter: “To me, playing a game is not just about getting to the end and beating the final boss. The actual playing of the game should be the reward in and of itself. The journey should be the valuable part, not the conclusion.”

Obviously, Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story will be very niche, and I’m pretty sure that most younger gamers wouldn’t touch this with a bargepole. But, if (like me) you grew up playing games on the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64 and so on and if gaming history is something that fascinates you… then this is a must-buy. Jeff Minter is a true original British icon of the microcomputer age of gaming. For me, he is the grandfather of indie gaming, and Digital Eclipse has done a sterling job of telling the story of his career. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is available now on Steam and all of the consoles and priced around £25.

If Digital Eclipse keeps knocking it out of the park with these interactive documentaries, they’ll need to start building bigger parks.