The sexy long-haired Jeff Minter was interviewed by Gamasutra about his life and more importantly also about his upcoming game Space Giraffe. We earlier informed you that an alpha version of the game was shipped to microsoft for ‘approval’ and we hadn’t heard anything since, until now. The fact that he’s still continuing development must be a good sign although unfortunately no release date was mentioned.

Many of the questions in the interview are about his previous endeavors in the video gaming industry but that’s not really important to us. Apparently Minter considers Space Giraffe as the unofficial sequel to Tempest 2000 which was released on Atari’s Jaguar over a decade ago. Below you’ll find a summary of the questions about Space Giraffe that have been distilled from the interview for your reading pleasure. Don’t expect to find too many hot new facts, but it’s a fun read nevertheless.

GS: It’s humorous to think that the Atari Jaguar and the Nuon were both doomed consoles that each had one thing going for them in the early stages, and that was the fact that you were making games for them. It’s almost as if your appearance on the platform has damned the 360!
JM: I kept hearing that from all over the place, and I just got fed up with it the other day and told people to fuck off! I figure the stuff will speak for itself. The games I worked on on those smaller platforms were more interesting to me. I was always offered more mainstream work, but I worked on the stuff that interested me, really. And it was a shame to work on things for so long and to have them go out to such a limited audience, but it’s great now, because we’re on Xbox 360, and there’s, what, ten million of them out there? We’ve got a platform!

GS: Plus in doing things that way, you managed to build a kind of mystique about your games as well.
JM: Yeah, and I figure that if Space Giraffe is striking enough, and if it goes out into Xbox Live Arcade and does well, then that’s a good statement of intent from us, and it’s a good platform upon which to build. I’m pretty certain it will do well. All the results I got coming back from alpha test, all the guys just love it to bits. They’re all saying that it’s better than Tempest 2000, and it’s better than anything that we’ve done.

GS: Are next-gen graphics particularly important to you?
JM: To me, a powerful GPU is more important. I’m not really that interested in doing realism, but in terms of using a GPU as a more and more powerful graphic synthesizer, I’m extremely interested. Pixel shading is heaven to me. It’s like it was made for me. It’s like a bunch of guys sat down in a room and said, “What can we make that will please Yak?” And then they made pixel shading. Thank you very much!

GS: Is it ever too much? Can there ever be too much on the screen for you?
JM: Not in the way the game is seen now. You could of course just chuck a bazillion things up there, but if you did that, the game would be illegible anyway. There has to be a certain upper limit just so you can read the game. Upper levels where two hundred, three hundred, or four hundred enemies fly in, you’re still doing stuff, and the game is still running at sixty frames per second.

GS: I mean, is it ever too much in a visual sense? I was watching that one level and it was difficult for me to parse what was going on.
JM: That was level sixty-four! That’s a bit of a boss level, and it’s going to be difficult to parse the first time you get to it. Graphically, it’s much more intense than any of the previous levels.

GS: Until I saw it in motion, I always wondered how I could understand and play Tempest 2000. Screenshots didn’t help much.
JM: Space Giraffe is the worst when it comes to screenshots. We put up screenshots, and people see them and think, “What the fuck is going on?” You can’t perceive it at all until you see it in motion. Once you see it and start playing it, it makes sense

GS: Through things like Xbox Live Arcade, the arcade style of game seems to be coming back. It seemed to be in sincere danger for awhile.
JM: It is coming back, because sometimes you want that sort of thing. Sometimes you just want to sit there and have a good old blast and not sit there and work your way through some forty or fifty hour epic.

GS: The Neon engine is running on one of the 360’s cores, right? Does Space Giraffe actually tap into that?
JM: No, Space Giraffe has its own version of the Neon engine that’s being a lot more optimized since it was put into the Xbox.

GS: Did Microsoft contact you for the Neon?
JM: Basically, my business dev guy saw what we were doing with the light synth we’d been using with Unity, and he knew this one guy he thought would be an evangelist for the Xbox 360. So he brought this guy to a party at my place, and we showed off what we’d done on the GameCube, and so he went back and started bending J. Allard’s ear.

And what was weird was that J. Allard had apparently been a fan for years. I went out and met with him at another party where I demonstrated an early version of Neon, and apparently he’d been keen for me to do the whole boot-up sequence for the original Xbox. He tried to contact me through e-mail, but the e-mail he sent ended up going to one of my old email addresses that I wasn’t using anymore, and I never got the e-mail. We would’ve loved to do the visualization stuff for the original Xbox as well. I was really quite surprised to hear about that.

I’m definitely looking forward to this freaky game, and you will too once you check out the video available in an earlier news post. Space Gireaffe has been in development for quite a while now and although the development team only consists of 2 guys we’re expecting to see it this year.

Thanks to DM2 for submitting this.