Jeff Minter Vents on Original Game Development

Jeff "Yak" Minter airs his opinions on the public's lack of interest in original game titles and the frustration is causes developers.

Jeff Minter, the popular game developer at the helm of studio Llamasoft, voiced his disgruntlement at the low sales of his recent Xbox LIVE Arcade release Space Giraffe as compared to Frogger, which outsold Space Giraffe ten-to-one in its first week.

Minter commented on Tuesday on his StinkyGoat blog:

Not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.

OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. We'll shut up trying to do anything new then. Sorry for even trying.

Despite his resentment, Minter has not closed up shop quite yet. "We're invested in XBLA now, and we *need* to re-use the SG framework for a couple of reasonably quick games - I think that's the way to make it work out for us, we just need more games in the pipeline. I'm already halfway through the next one and I just want to get my head down and get on with it."

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IMO good solid gameplay is as Original if not more so than a quirkily indepent game.

OK, we get the message. All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games and crap you vaguely remember playing on your Amiga. We'll shut up trying to do anything new then. Sorry for even trying.

Excellent! :D
Don't worry, Jeff, there are people who want to try new stuff.
But seriously, just try to sell a game called "Space Giraffe" when it starts from scratch.
Maybe you should have tried, err... Jeff Minter's Space Giraffe!

Wait.
That makes it weirder in fact.

Yet, strangely, his whining publicly about it doesn't make me want to rush out and buy his game. Huh

Not seeing a lot of reason to continue even trying to make games, at this point, when a remake of Frogger, one of the worst games in the history of old arcade games, can outsell Space Giraffe that we put so much love and effort into, by more than ten to one, in one week.

This really seems (at least to me) to be an odd kind of "glass is half-empty" view on things. Forget that it's games - on a product level, is it really a surprise that a 26 year old worldwide brand sells more of its product than a recent release into the same marketplace? It's less a global benchmark on what people want to play than it is a clear example of the power of brand value in a given market - you may have a better final product, but Frogger is known. Seriously, if you were selling an arcade game, would you want to compare your early sales to Frogger?

Any new game not accompanied by a huge marketing push is going to take a while to get established (Possibly more time if it has a deliberately quirky title like "Space Giraffe"). Frogger's established brand is just as good as a marketing push (who doesn't know or is familiar with Frogger?) - its comparing two different types of commercial approaches to game sales.

It is possible that people don't give a **** about giraffes to begin with.

Odd game for him to be claiming this on, considering that, from everything I've seen on it it's basically some sort of bastard love-child between Tempest and WinAmp visualizations. Reviews mostly seem to centre around it being too hard to see with all the crap floating around on the screen with it, making death pretty much a random occurrence unless you happened to be on the right sort of drugs to get you "in the groove"

So perhaps, Mr. Minter, the problem isn't necessarily that people aren't ready for good, original gameplay, but rather that you simply haven't provided it.

Space Giraffe is not original.

It's Tempest with pounding techno beat and lots of visual clutter such that the only challenge is trying to figure out how you keep from dying.

But yes, nostalgia factor is often far more effective as a marketing tool for new ports of old games than it would be for new games. And any sane commenter knew full well that when XBLA blew up it was going to come down to a handful of games that everyone played, maybe a few more that a few played, and hundreds more that no one could give a crap about.

Maybe by griping about it, Minter managed to get some people to actually buy Space Giraffe, but given that anyone can play the demo beforehand, they're likely to know exactly what they're getting before they play it. Which is to say, they're going to know better than to spend money on his monstrous ego.

Puzzle Quest is available on XBLA, however, and so are the versions of Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne that will make you wonder why it took until now to make a mass-produced video game version of these games so you don't have to quibble about who earned the most points.

All you want on that channel is remakes of old, shite arcade games

And he's remade Tempest how many times?...

I admit, I like good retro remakes, but Space Giraffe just looked like a mess. When it comes to effects, someone really needs to tell him that more is not necessarily better.

As pointed out above, people get to play the demo before they buy. If he's pee'd off about people preferring Frogger to SG, and they get to play both demos first, is he so blind as to see that it might not be the buying public who are getting it wrong?

I played the demo today for...10 secs before I loudly said "screw giraffes" and promptly quit, deleted the game, and proceeded to play marble blast ultra. which, by the way, is an AMAZING game. You may feel a little "odd" playing it, but I haven't found a person yet that once I've showed them a few levels, they haven't begged to play it for a while. To me, Marble blast is a semi original game that is selling like crack on XBL arcade, next to Geometry wars, that is. This guy needs to piss off and create something fun to play, preferably not something I'd have to be completely wasted or high to understand.

Ok, Gauntlet III.

Space giraffe is NOT tempest

However it IS difficult to understand at first.

Jeff Minter's problem is that he designed the game around an antiquated premise of racking up a high score.

Modern games are not about score- they are about advancing levels. A person can play SG in 'tempest mode' and be punished not by death but by a crappy score. This means NOTHING when gamers do not even care about the score in the first place.

Those who dismissed SG or assume that it is merely a remake of tempest need to approach it again with this in mind. It truly is original, and when played properly great fun, not to mention visually beautiful.

I don't think Minter is justified in saying that the public doesnt want original games. He should understand that his original game comes across as completely unoriginal and uninteresting when approached the way 90% of the modern market would approach it.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Notwithstanding the fact that Space Giraffe is by most reports not a bad game, I think this is hilarious. I haven't heard this kind of "take my ball and go home" whining since I was, oh, about six. The "sorry for even trying" part is especially good; I can so easily visualize him saying it with his head turned and arms crossed and lower lip stuck out in a classic angry school-girl pout.

Here's a suggestion, Jeff: People might pay more attention to your game if you weren't trying so desperately to be edgy and hip about it. You know what they say about first impressions? Now say "Space Giraffe" out loud and think about it for a minute. If you're still not catching on, ask the GNU Image Manipulation Program folks about the debilitating consequences of having a really stupid name for your software.

I played through the Space Giraffe demo on XBLA twice, and then roundfiled it. For all it's "originality", it turned out to look and feel too much like Tempest with a strobelight aimed in my eyes for my tastes.

As to Minter's complaint that folks aren't looking for originality, well, that's not entirely true. Look at Portal and Wii Sports, for instance. It's that originality doesn't trump enjoyable gameplay and good design. A game could be radically new, venturing into completely fresh pastures of gameplay concepts, and still suck if the objectives aren't clear and players can't figure out the controls.

People are going for the retro titles simply because they're already proven to be enjoyable. We're not seeing releases of the ancient crud (no ET on XBLA, eh?) but of the tried-and-true classics; games people have already played and enjoyed many times over. Given a choice between a dubious unknown or an old favourite, odds greatly favour the old favourite getting people's luchre... because people want to know they'll have fun.

-- Steve