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.”