Game of the week: Getting to know the author in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story

This week's Game of the Week is Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. It was not a difficult decision, and that's no slight to Penny's Big Breakaway, which is a really gorgeous and creative 3D platformer that offers nostalgia as well as something new.

In many ways, what's great about Penny is what's great about Llamasoft too. These are games made by creators whose tastes we have come to understand. I know what I'm getting from a game Christian Whitehead has worked on. In the future, it wouldn't surprise me if he got the same kind of treatment Jeff Minter got in Digital Eclipse's latest.

I have gotten myself back to front, which is always easy when Minter is concerned. Slow down. Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is the latest in Digital Eclipse's Gold Master series. This is a kind of Criterion approach to video games. With The Making of Karateka we got a deep dive into a specific game, a deep dive that offered a fascinating window into its creator, Jordan Mechner. In Llamasoft, we get the biography of a company, taking us through the classic games of the 80s and 90s and leaving us with a sense of where things went next.