This video is an important document. Come on, I can't be the only person commenting on this!

Yow, the European Attack of the Mutant Camels does look an awful lot like the 2600 Empire Strikes Back.

Anyway, the crowd just seems totally unimpressed with these Williams-esque sound effects and light shows being coaxed out of machines that, these days, have less memory than a good calculator. I'd have thought the Google guys were more hip than that.

Best moment: Demonstrating Llamatron, he's playing and running around and shooting things, and mutters, by way of explaination, "...Kill Zippy the Pinhead...", who of COURSE is an enemy in the game.

It is very interesting, I think, to see these European games, and the European computer magazines of the 80s especially, and

Also appreciated was Minter's vehemence about "real" shareware as opposed to what we have today, which he rightfully calls crippleware. Thinking back, I realize, yeah... it was something that would be more called "donationware" these days, but the larger shareware companies (Apogee for example) transitioned it over to crippled "trail" game kinds of things so fast that the original idea never got a chance to catch hold.

I am ashamed to admit that this is the first time I've had a chance to see Tempest 2000 in action. God, why can't awesome things like this gain more traction in the industry? Even the casual game sphere, which you'd think would be more geared to this brand of awesomeness, tends to produce things that look more like Jimmy Flash in Macromediaworld. Which isn't bad, when done well, but something about Minter's words about avoiding representational graphics appeals to me deeply.

I was very interested to hear about his design process, which is more about playing around with a set of ideas and working them until a game comes out of them, instead of starting with a design document that explains a plan that must be implemented. It reminds me, really, of my own Commodore efforts many years ago (in fact, this is really the only way to do a freelance game, in which hopefully the developer is having as much fun in the making as the player will in the playing), but it also reminds of bit about Nintendo's in-house design process, which is reputed to involve making many experiments and prototypes, although I imagine that once some good core ideas are decided upon they tend to go more along the lines of the rest of the industry.

His attitude to storytelling is interesting, but he doesn't mention what is perhaps the greatest problem with game storytelling, which is, bluntly: IT SUCKS. I can only name a small number of games that have had good storytelling in them. Generally game stories are the opposite of well-written, and the more "epic" the game is supposed to be, the worse the story turns out. It is nothing less than shameful.

Some of the cooler level names seen in the video: Cube Is Not For Yiffing, PET 2001, May I Have A Drop of Fire, Misuse of the Apostrophe, Another Day At The Orifice

Most unexpected name to come up during the talk: novelty musician Ray Stevens.

I like to imagine that there's an parallel universe out there in which Tempest 2000 took the world by storm commercially as well as critically, and in which the Atari of the time went on to become king of the console gaming space (and, naturally, Atari Games overcame the crush of Street Fighter 2 clones and reconquered arcade gaming). It is a nicer world: the sky is bluer, the grass, greener, and on that grass there are yaks everywhere.