Full transcript:

In 2007, I recorded the penultimate episode of Jmac’s Arcade, a reminiscence of the all-but forgotten video game I, Robot. This is a bit of what I had to say at the time:

“Though I didn’t play it much at the time, apparently my experience of seeing it in the arcade is unusual; it was a pretty rare machine, and how one would make its way to the Bangor, Maine game room I frequented I’ll never know. […] The game itself is actually pretty fun. Despite the title, the story—such as it is—is more Phil Dick than Asimov, with some Orwell thrown in for flavor—the game was released around 1984, after all, a year which contained as many winking references to its namesake novel as you might imagine. Stylistically, the game’s a 3-D platformer in its most literal sense…”

Ah, I was in such a rush to get the words out, back then…

Also in 2007, Jeff Minter celebrated a quarter century of being the video game world’s best known ruminant-obsessed creator with his company’s release of the psychedelic shoot-em-up called Space Giraffe. Hobbling out on knobby knees, it clattered onto Xbox, the game console I was most interested in at the time. The reception was nonplussed, at best. Most gamers of the day did not know what to make of an acid-house alternate-universe take on Tempest, one full of quite intentionally impenetrable visuals: as much a neurological hack to shock the player into a flow state as a traditional game with scores and levels. According to Minter, it was outsold ten-to-one by another publisher’s simultaneous remake of Frogger.

In 2025, Llamasoft—the game company helmed by Minter and his partner Ivan Zorzin—quietly released another game whose lineage passes through both Space Giraffe and I, Robot. In fact, it’s called I, Robot, and it’s presented as a remake of that forgotten game from 1984, the same one I recorded a monologue about just as Space Giraffe started to ship to a world of unready Xbox fans.

And you know I couldn’t let that pass without comment.

This is Venthuffer, a reverie of the Valve Steam Deck, by Halstrick.

Playing I, Robot on my Steam Deck with my headphones clamped on, letting my whole sensorium be battered by pulsing visuals and squealing sound effects as I fought to gain a sliver of comprehension about what I was even doing, I had the thought: Jeff Minter is the Miyazaki of… whatever this is.

Building on an early career that helped define the scrappy UK gaming scene in the 80s with innumerable titles about mutant camels and stolen lawnmowers, Minter made a worldwide splash in 1994 with Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar console, a remake of Dave Theurer’s classic arcade shooter from 1981. Minter’s other creative passion involved creating music visualizers, or what he called light synthesizers, going all the way back to a simple demo called Psychedelia for the VIC-20 home computer in 1984. Some 20 years later, he co-developed Neon, the music visualizer built into the Xbox 360 console, and and this swiftly became the graphical basis for the full-court audiovisual chaos of Space Giraffe. The game’s mechanics are clearly inspired by Tempest, but Minter has always insisted that Space Giraffe is not a followup game, but its own bizarre beastie.

Despite whatever disappointment Llamasoft might have felt from the game’s divisive reviews, Space Giraffe clearly set the course for Minter’s subsequent work. Now co-designing with Zorzin, Minter led Llamasoft into a prolific post-Giraffe period that continues through today, releasing scads of new work for mobile and console platforms, all bursting with the same intense energy, immediately identifiable by their mix of hyperstimulating visuals with barnyard-infused soundscapes.

I had largely missed Minter’s first act in the 80s—I did enjoy the Atari 800 port of his first international megahit, Gridrunner, but I was too young to feel particularly curious about its authorship, and none of his weirder games about mystical goat-men and cosmic hover-sheep could easily reach a kid in the US. But by the aughts I had become aware enough of his name to pick up Space Giraffe with interest, and followed the controversy around it with enthusiasm, even spooling out some blog posts about how the fallacy of authorial intent applied to Minter’s defenses of the game’s perceived inscrutability.

And, since then, I have bought every Llamasoft game I could: the reboot of Gridrunner for iPhone, the VR madness of Polybius on my PlayStation 4, the inevitable Tempest 4000 on Nintendo Switch, and now I, Robot on my Steam Deck. The launch of each one felt like a reason to celebrate, like a band you loved in your youth dropping a new album unexpectedly.

This despite the fact that I haven’t really loved any of this work! I’m not sure I’d call any single title a great game. But I recognize the whole collection as part of something profoundly important, and worth paying for, and experiencing, and even studying.

The most salient study question is this: Who are these games for?

To a first order of approximation, nobody in earshot of me mentions a new Llamasoft game launch, despite the legendary status of its head designer. In 2025, Minter has been a globally recognized auteur for more than 40 years, and yet I heard about I, Robot through a single offhand Mastodon post by veteran game designer Ian Malcolm. The subject of that post, in fact, was Malcolm expressing pride at attaining a top-25 spot in the new game’s global leaderboards, and acknowledging that this was only possible due to the combination of novelty and obscurity that he has come to associate with all Llamasoft releases.

Who is I, Robot for? Few people know about the original 1984 arcade game, fewer have seen it—let alone played it in its original cabinet—and I would hazard that fewer still know that its designer, Dave Theurer, was the same talent behind the orginal Tempest. I seriously wonder if the number of living people who can join me in claiming all three is larger than a dozen people. It can’t possibly be more than a hundred.

So, if I wanted to, I’d have ground to claim that I, Robot is for me! Beyond the connection to Theurer’s original game that I’ve felt since 2007, the Llamasoft rework has more deep-cut references that delight and astound me, such as one level that is an explicit homage to Amidar, another primordial arcade game from 1981.

But the truth, of course, is that I, Robot—like every other game from Llamasoft—is for Jeff Minter. The excellent 2024 interactive biopic “Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story” opens with an epigraph, quoting an old magazine ad: “He makes ‘em so he can play ‘em.” Minter isolated the elements that he loved about video games and music with his solo work in the 1980s, and all of his team’s output since then has been iteration and refinement using these same elements, again and again. Minter has welcomed all the intervening advances in game platform technology, but has used them strictly to dive ever-deeper into realizing his narrow and uncompromising vision for what a good game is, combining frenetic action with electronic dance beats, psychedelic colors, absurdly chatty text, and a vast collection of sampled ancient-arcade bleeps and hoofed-mammal chatterings.

Jeff Minter is hardly the only active game designer making deeply personal work today. But very few creators in this space have such a lengthy ludography, one that has attained an astounding depth of expression by mindfully limiting the breadth of its interest. Theuer’s I, Robot had a frame story about a plucky little android rebelling against the watchful eye of Big Brother, staying one step ahead of its wrath. Minter’s I, Robot does away with all that, and signals the fact by sticking a pair of ovine horns on the robot’s head, making its only mission the ever-deeper furtherance of the Llamasoft oeuvre.

I have the impression that Minter’s focus is driven less by obsession than joy. He has been a prolific poster to social media since the publication of Space Giraffe during the LiveJournal era. I have followed him off and on over the years, through Twitter and now Mastodon, tagging along as he wakes up, brews tea, tends adoringly to his flock of pet sheep, and then goes to the pub for a curry. Every now and then he might head into town for a show—maybe Underworld is touring again! Somewhere in there, he makes games, or codes up game-adjacent doodads, and posts hints and scraps of them. All of these things make him happy, and he enjoys sharing them. Again and again, every day, across years. I think he might be one of the happiest people on the internet.

As I record this, my plays of I, Robot last only a few minutes, all my lives draining out on the presently inexplicable level five. I can’t yet claim any profound connection with the game. But I take such energy and inspiration from its role as the latest step on a brilliant artist’s personal creative journey, one that I feel very fortunate to coincide with. The ongoing work of Minter and Zorzin has so much to teach me about the primacy of finding what things bring you joy, and—as much as possible—simplifying your life down to their daily practice. Of continuously exploring and refining yourself, through focused, iterative, and meaningful creation. And, maybe every few years, releasing a bit of that into the world, to dance on its own, with colors radiant, and swirling, and wooly.

This has been Venthuffer. You can learn more about this show, and find links to the things that I mentioned in this episode, at Venthuffer dot com. If you enjoy this show, tell your friends! And you can find me on Steam, as Halstrick.