HEART OF NEON is...
I didn’t know how things were going to end when I set out to tell Jeff’s story. For one thing, it’s still happening, with more twists and turns every day. The trick is to stay focused on what is important.
One of the big reasons I wanted to tell Jeff’s story was because of Unity, a project Jeff engaged with in the early 2000s that never reached a satisfying conclusion. I’d seen a couple of videos on YouTube that really looked amazing to me at the time. I wanted to know more about why I was denied the opportunity to play this amazing looking thing.
I wrote this in the last newsletter of 2021:
this month is something of a breakthrough. It includes a new, more polished version of the Retrovision story, as well as an intro to the YAKYAK forums and a brief history of Jeff’s unfinished Gamecube game, UNITY.
The middle years of Jeff’s career are the years I knew the least about when tackling this project. I had an idea of how things developed, but Jeff himself largely glossed over the period and I didn’t pursue it in the interviews.
On paper, and what Jeff did say about Unity in the interviews, sounds inspiring as heck: The project was called Unity because the fundamental premise was to marry the two threads of his development career together in once project, both his high-octane game design and his psychedelic lightsynth technology. All this on a Nintendo console with stunning visual capabilities.
But in the end it just didn’t happen.
What emerged out of my investigation of that outcome was what ultimately became the backbone of the film as it exists now. While Unity was happening, this other thing was also growing and changing: YakYak was the online community that coalesced around Jeff’s new messageboard, this always-online found-family of likeminded people who had realized Jeff had been out of the limelight for a bit and were looking for what he was doing next.
I’d been dazzled by the technology, but it was the community that meant the most, because while Unity didn’t arrive when expected, the community endured and remained, a supportive, nurturing and occasionally combative forum for people who liked all or some of what Jeff likes to do.
From the same 2021 newsletter:
…I was focusing on the games. I didn’t know anything about Retrovision, for example, and I didn’t understand how important the Llamasoft Jollies were going to be in the story I’m telling now. Piecing it together from the supporting interviews with Jeff’s friends has been challenging and incredibly rewarding, and I think I’ve navigated my way through those uncharted narrative waters and into much more familiar territory with new focus.
My biggest takeaway from this whole project has been the sustaining power of a supportive community. The YakYak community was diverse, with eclectic tastes and wildly divergent world views, but they all came together because of something Jeff did. Granted, this came into being in the early days of the Internet, before the aggressive partitioning of tastes and the siloing of ideas by algorithmic dictate. But it existed, and stands for something important that resides in the heart of what Jeff Minter brings to the world. His heart of neon, if you will.
This whole experience inspired the campaign I’ve partnered with the IGDA Foundation to create - #WeAreIndiedev - a celebration of the world-wide gamedev community that brings passion and commitment to their shared mission to exploit the mechanics of game design to be their chosen medium of expression. And it could well be the _only_ thing they have in common is their shared passion. But sometimes passion is enough.
Stay passionate. Pursue unity.
