When I was a wee lad - like, properly young, let's call it a gentleman's seven or eight years of age - the world of the Commodore 64 PC was first opened to me. Now, this would have been (given the age range I just provided), the early 90s. Call it 1992 or 93. The Commodore 64 was not, at this time, a computer that people still used, really, but it was the second of two computers that were in my grandfather's work office (the other one was a proper grey block of a PC, running first an MS DOS-based menu, then later on Windows 3.1, and eventually was replaced with a Gateway PC a few years later with a Gateway running Windows 95. I have a lot of memories tied to those as well, but that's not what we're here to talk about today).
The Commodore 64 had been left behind by one of my uncles, who had also thoughtfully left a giant plastic case full of 8 1/4" floppy discs with an absolutely ridiculous amount of pirated Commodore 64 software on them. There may have been one or two legitimate games in there, but my copy of Blue Max definitely was provided by someone who had ignored the chastising message in the code not to crack it. One of my favorite games on that particular PC was a frankly ridiculous game about mowing the lawn using your neighbor's mower that you'd borrowed without his permission. That game was titled Hover Bovver, and if you really want you can play it over here in your browser, bearing in mind of course that it is browser emulation and therefore a bit wonky (you can go full sicko and grab a copy of it to run in a C64 emulator but I would absolutely never do such a thing like point you in the direction of anywhere such repositories exist.
The point is, it all started with this game here:
Ignore the fact that this is from the Atari version of the game, I assure you it basically looks like this on the C64 too. I fucking loved this game, because the premise is silly and your dog friend will occasionally get pissy at you and attack you if its loyalty meter drops too low. Playing it in the janky online emulator I linked earlier, I still like it! It is a top ten Commodore 64 game for me, along with the aforementioned Blue Max, Space Taxi, and seven other titles I can't be arsed to look up at the moment.
I did not know it then, and literally only found out today, that Hover Bovver was in fact my first encounter with Llamasoft, and more specifically, with Jeff Minter, who is thus retroactively the first game developer I know of who really got his fucking hooks in me - yes, this was before I'd even really had a chance to play much Super Mario Bros, so Miyamoto will have to settle for second place. I didn't own an NES until about a year after the SNES launched! All my gaming systems were secondhand, and there are some (any Sega console, the SNES) that I never owned at all, because we just never could afford the damn things.
Anyway, the funny thing is, I didn't re-encounter Minter until the release of Space Giraffe, but in the meantime Minter had continued making just a shitload of games, really just a stupid amount, honestly, but all for systems I didn't really encounter. I think there may have been some other Llamasoft games among the C64 games at my grandfather's (Metagalactic Llamas and Attack of the Mutant Camels both look awfully familiar to me), but Hover Bovver is the one that stands out. Space Giraffe has the honor of being one of the first games I bought for my newly-acquired Xbox 360 Arcade edition, because it was the only game small enough to fit on the tiny memory card they gave you with that (I could not, at the time, afford the hard drive add-on for the system, so it was that and Braid as far as downloadable games went).
Space Giraffe kicks ass. I know this, you know this, we all know this. It takes the Tempest formula and alters it just enough to make it stand alone as its own thing, plus you get to stare into the benevolent eyes of Allard to start off. I also happen to think the soundtrack rules. I played the shit out of it, because it was one of the only games I owned but also because (and here's the bit I originally was gonna talk about before I discovered the whole Hover Bovver link this morning) sometimes you just want a game to be about sweet music, cool visual effects, and a score to chase. In other words, sometimes you just want a fucking arcade game, man, and if there is one thing Minter has done in his decades of developing, it is boil down arcade games to a fucking science.*
I mean, let's talk about Polybius for just a second. The game throws a billion different audio and visual effects at you (some of the audio effects are downright jarring - I am 99% certain the ZX Spectrum loading noise is in there, aka one of the harshest fuckin' sounds known to science) and then, because it is only right, he curates a soundtrack of trance techno so that by the time you finish a level your pulse is elevated and your brain is scrambled. Then the next level starts and you go again and it is, frankly, wonderful to chase your high score, to seek to get just a few more shots off, or get out of a particularly challenging level with just a few more lives.
I mean just listen to this fucking thing. This isn't even my favorite track, it is just particularly driving and thus gets special mention.
Also, just look at this fucking thing:
This all started with me installing Space Giraffe on my Steam Deck to see if it worked (it does, although you need to fiddle with the controller layout to get it working properly), and ended with me buying the entire Llamasoft library that is currently available on Steam, and also Tempest 4000 because I fuckin' love Tempest and a Tempest that Jeff Minter has gotten his hands on is, you know, just a better Tempest (I will, of course, be playing the shit out of Tempest 2000 when I finally get around to grabbing that Atari 50th collection and finally achieve my childhood dream of playing Atari Jaguar games). But the thing that shocks me is that while (nearly) all of Minter's recent output can be described as "variations on a theme (the theme is Tempest) is how different each game manages to be. Moose Life, his most recent release, has you bouncing between the ceiling and floor and gives you control of forward and backward motion to boot. Gridrunner Revolution starts off playing like Centipede and then becomes more like Asteroid and could go even further than that, I wouldn't know, I fucking suck at it and haven't gotten very far yet. Tempest 4000 is... Okay, that one's just Tempest 2000 with flashier graphics, but it is still extremely good (and gives you the ability to jump which... I don't think is in the original Tempest but it's been a while so I might be wrong). More importantly it gives you the haunting voice that informs you at the end of every level that your superzapper has been recharged. All of these games (except, damnably, Tempest 4000) run on the Steam Deck, so if you want an idea of how I spend my downtime during my work day it is giving myself the brain scramblies playing these games.
Recently - by which I mean like, late last night, Minter's account tweeted out what I hope is a description of his next project: A game called Posh Lawn Panic, which sounds awfully familiar in concept and mechanics to a game I played as a little kid visiting his grandparents and wondering just why the hell the neighbors were being so damn stingy about their lawn mowers.
I can't fucking wait.
*Special mention here for the decidedly not-Minter-produced Geometry Wars, which is another example of a game that is extremely simple and wants you to just continuously shoot them damn ships down so you can get a better score than last time with a good soundtrack and fantastic visuals.