The wizard of gaming psychedelia is back on his bullshit

polygon.com:

If it’s possible to be an institution and an outsider at the same time, then Jeff Minter is both. He is, perhaps, the last of the original lone gunmen in video games. As a self-taught teenage coder, he joined the explosive homebrew game development scene in the U.K. in the early 1980s, cranking out surreal home computer games inspired by the arcade classics, mostly on his own. Unlike most of his peers from that time, he has been doing pretty much exactly that ever since. For 40 years.

His latest game, the newly released Akka Arrh, reunites him with Atari, the company with which he made one of his most famous and brilliant games: Tempest 2000, a pounding, techno-infused 1994 reinterpretation of an already hypnotic 1981 arcade machine. Minter and Atari have had their ups and downs over the years, but something keeps drawing them back together. In this case, it’s a rare, unreleased arcade game that was thought lost for many years, and was rumored to be too difficult to release.

“There was only one guy who had a working copy of it; he had a coin-op and wouldn’t release the ROMs,” Minter tells me over a video call from Wales, where he lives in rural isolation, with a flock of sheep, a llama, a donkey, and his partner in life and work, Ivan “Giles” Zorzin. (Minter loves llamas, and also camels, sheep, moose, goats, and ungulates of all kinds, and takes every opportunity to put these animals in his games. His company is called Llamasoft.) He’s an affable, scruffy, 60-year-old longhair from the English Midlands with the sense of humor of a generation raised on Monty Python and recreational drugs: the sort you’d expect to find down the pub in a leather coat, talking about obscure prog rock. Behind him I can see disorderly piles