Llamasoft's Jeff Minter

It's nice to let people have programmable hardware, one way or another. That's one thing I think is missing from the modern user experience. Back in the old days, when you had your Spectrums, and your Commodore 64s, everybody would try their hand at a bit of code as well. Now you get consoles and you take what's dolled out. And it's quite nice that they've opened up a way for people to have a try themselves. I think it's a very good idea.

I don't know if tastes have changed that much. Technology has driven taste to a great extent; people always want the latest and greatest graphical techniques or whatever. But I can see that quieting down a bit in the medium-term future, because we're getting a bit homogenised now; graphics have reached a point where the improvements are small increments as opposed to huge great strides. The difference from 2D to 3D meant everybody had to immediately do loads of 3D, whereas now, the next generation of consoles will just have the same stuff with a bit more detail. So perhaps that kind of impetus will not be so important.

There is still a taste for old-style games. If you look at stuff like LittleBigPlanet, which I was just playing the other day, it's basically a 2D platform game with physics. If you did that as an entirely 2D game it would still be enjoyable. Perhaps things like XNA will allow smaller projects to still survive and perhaps thrive. It would be a shame to lose them entirely. The older game forms are still valid game forms, in the same way that when film came along it didn't banish books, I don't see why 3D should banish 2D. It would be nice to keep them all alive and keep them all relevant.

Yeah, although that's probably not going to be the final title.

Ha! Yeah. It's like the third iteration of Gridrunner. That's nearly finished on the Xbox 360.

No. We sent it off to [Microsoft] months ago, but they've just not said anything - we're just waiting for them. Basically I'm going to carry on with the PC version of it if I don't hear from them soon, because they're just sitting on the demo we sent them three or four months ago. We haven't heard a thing.

I wouldn't mind. I find the whole idea of the controls and the sensors quite intriguing. But it's a question of having time for it to be commercially viable - at the moment we're so skint we've got to make money as best we can!

It might do on the iPhone. Part of the problem with mobile phone gaming was, a) the screens were rubbish, b) the controls were usually rubbish as well; if they had a d-pad on at all it was always a rubbish d-pad. With the iPhone, where you're forced to take the controls in a different direction, because you haven't got any buttons at all. If you can come out with a game that works well with those kind of controls... Technically the screen is good, it can do reasonably nice, fast 3D - it's quite a capable little platform. Given that the controls hopefully won't be rubbish and that the platform is ubiquitous and really rather good, I would like to think gaming will take off a lot better on the iPhone than on previous phones.

At the moment we're just working on Gridrunner+++, and we should have that finished in a couple of months. But we're probably just going to have a chill out over Christmas now we've got [Space Giraffe PC] out of the way.

Haha! Possibly.

I've got my dog who's sat next to me now. I've got nine sheep, two llamas, and one pygmy goat.

Well they're all treated the same, really - you can't have favourites, although one of the sheep is a particular favourite, I suppose, in that she always comes up and wants hugs and cuddles.

I'm also playing Animal Crossing on the DS. I'm playing WipEout HD; we just the other day got my plasma [TV] back from the repairers, as it had blown up.

So far, probably the Xbox 360, in terms of having the most games I actually play on it. The PS3, after a slow start, is definitely catching up, and it's a nice machine to use. The Wii is good, but for a different kind of gaming, really - it's a different feel of gaming on the Wii. It's a bit more light-hearted. The Wii is what you fire up for a bit of a laugh and a joke around rather than really serious gaming. But it's quite nice. Sometimes that's what you want.

Well, a real one is nice, but I always think it's a bit unkind to kill it. Get a real one and plant it afterwards, I reckon.

You could go out and do a stealth planting in the middle of the night. You could surprise somebody with a tree in the middle of their lawn.

A nice reindeer.

This is a question I have actually asked somebody who has reindeer. They do like a colder climate; the only herd in Britain is in Scotland. They need this particular kind of moss or something; a plant that they really need and they can only get in that climate. So I don't think really could just bring one down here and shove it in with the rest of the beasties, I don't think it would do well.

Haha! Could do. I could put antlers on the sheep!

Only that I hope people enjoy it and give it a chance.