RIGHT-MINDED COMMODORE 64 GAMERS ALREADY KNOW JEFF MINTER IS THE GOAT, SO OF COURSE YOU WILL WANT TO HEAR ABOUT THE TIME HE MADE HIS OWN 8-BIT GOAT SIMULATOR
IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: LLAMASOFT
» DEVELOPER: JEFF MINTER
» RELEASED: 1984
» PLATFORM: COMMODORE 64
» GENRE: PUZZLE-ADVENTURE-SHOOTER
Jeff Minter proudly points to a framed picture of a half-goat, half-man hybrid on the wall of his Welsh farmhouse. “That’s the original artwork for the cover of Ancipital done by Steinar Lund. People talk about images created by AI but it’s nothing compared to sitting down with an actual artist who knows what the fuck they’re doing, talking about your vision for the game over a couple of spliffs and they go away and come up with something excellent like that.”
We are not talking over a couple of spliffs but we have just had a shot of baijiu, a Chinese liquor-come-paint stripper, which may explain why we wonder aloud if Jeff actually posed for the painting, given there’s a certain similarity to the Minter profile. “No, but I can see the resemblance,” he grins. “This big, shaggy, smelly, goatee creature.”
The inspiration for the star of Llamasoft’s final release of 1984 actually came from literature. Jeff was a huge fan of Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia Trilogy, a science-fiction series set on a planet where humans and Ancipitals battle for supremacy. Jeff even made enquiries about an official tie-in with the books but soon got the impression this would be a lengthy as well as costly negotiation. “Luckily, ancipital is a real word so they didn’t own it,” he explains. “It means something like ‘doubleedged’ in reference to ‘horns’, so I thought, ‘Yeah, we can use that!’”
Jeff created a white-furred, goatoid sprite and added him to the roster of enemies in Sheep In Space, released earlier that year, where you’ll find the Ancipital scurrying along the planet’s surface in that superlative shooter. Yet by casting him as a villain, Jeff felt a lasting sense of guilt. “This is a recurring theme for me,” he says. “I’d made camels the enemy in Attack Of The Mutant Camels, but I really like them, so I made them the heroes of Revenge Of The Mutant Camels. I knew I had to do the same for [the] Ancipital!”
So the goat became the star of Jeff’s next project and he resolved to use it as an opportunity to explore game styles new to him. “I’d never done a platform game so I wanted to have jumping in this one,” he explains. “There was also a bit of competition back then to get as many levels in as possible, so I wanted to make my game have a big map… and if there’s a map you have to explore, that’s like an adventure, so I wanted to p
