HEART OF NEON is...
I admire what Jeff has been able to accomplish. I lacked the acumen to become a successful solo gamedev, and I lacked the leadership skills to be able to create an effective team. I know all that to be true because I tried. I don’t recall if I’ve shared this story anywhere else, but I’m confident I haven’t because I don’t see much profit in talking about failure. But in the wake of my second #WeAreINDIEDEV livestream I can see perhaps that this story explains a lot about why I’m doing what I’m doing now…
Back in 1992 I left the UK to live in the northeast corner of the U.S. - New Hampshire, specifically. For a while I continued to work remotely with a UK game developer, sharing media using the pre-Netscape version of the Internet via an account at the local college. That arrangement didn’t last, for a few reasons. While all parties wanted to keep the relationship going, I was not yet great at working remotely, and that period of the 90s coincided with the massive market shift within the games industry when, amongst other things, Nintendo required significant financial investment for development kits to be able to work on the highly anticipated upcoming console, the Nintendo 64. The company I was working for was one of those developers and I was basically told that if I wanted to keep working for them I could either come back to work in-house in the UK, or I could expect to be let go. So that was that…
It was a real eye opener. It’s like I had woken up from a daze to realize that I hadn’t really been paying attention to what was going on. My skills were suddenly less valuable, and I didn’t have any kind of support system in the U.S. It wasn’t a great time.
When I examined my options, they were slim. There were no local entertainment software companies in my vicinity on the east coast. There was Looking Glass Studios in Massachusetts, and Bethesda in Maryland, but they weren’t hiring. The bulk of work being done on the kind of games I was qualified for were on the west coast, but the scale of those productions was dispiriting. I’d be a low-level pixel artist in a much larger department, and the facelessness of that after my brief but vivid career as an 8-bit artist in the UK was, I don’t know… unappealing doesn’t cover it. I didn’t have a good map for the emerging 90s gamedev terrain.
I auditioned as gfx designer for Unreal at Epic around 1995. Didn’t get the gig.
This was around 1995, though, and at the time shareware gamedevs were big news. The internet was already an active hub for spreading shareware and gamedev info, and for a moment I thought I could organize a group of gamedevs to make something happen as an indiedev team, in a similar manner to the way I’d working in demo groups back in Edinburgh when I first started out on Compunet. The details of my plans are now lost in time, but I was for a time very active on the Usenet game dev forums looking for collaborators who were open to a loose collaborative gamedev arrangement.
I wanted to call it Radix Developments, in honor of the demo group I started in the late 80s with Graham Hunter (You only have to type that name into Google to see what an unoriginal name that was). And there was genuine interest from people all over, but as an organizer I was unable to answer some fairly obvious, basic questions, like who retains copyright, and how does everyone get paid if we’re all freelance working in different countries? Where is the bankroll coming from? Optimism and naiveté don’t pay the bills. Without access to better advice, my plans stumbled at the first hurdle and didn’t evolve further. I found work with an indiedev that paid well, and I struggled along with them for a couple of years until I eventually abandoned gamedev altogether.
Times have most definitely changed, and while I initially embarked on the HEART OF NEON project to educate modern audiences about the unique circumstances of the early gamedev era, it has become an opportunity to educate _myself_ about the current world of indiedev, a growing community far richer and more supportive than I could ever have imagined.
I launched the #WeAreINDIEDEV campaign to shine a light on this community and share their spirit with a wider audience. Every gamedev’s story is different, but they all share the common goal of making something wonderful to share with the world. I want there to be more conversation about gamedev as artistic expression, about gamedev being and artistic field in the same way creative writing or musical composition. Jeff Minter’s story I believe is inspiring not the least because he pursued his art in spite of the changes in the market where his art is sold. He’s never followed fads or fashions, and consequently never became rich. But his art has grown stronger and more sophisticated and intensely his as he has progressed. I know most twenty-somethings will perceive Jeff as an oddity, some crazy old man they can’t relate to, but the message that it IS possible to create artistic video games and to have that be your life’s work is a potent one for a generation who perhaps for the first time see video games as something more than just a frivolous waste of time…
Help get HEART OF NEON finished: Buy some merch! We have some stock from Zzap Live 2024 of the unique Robin Levy poster art. A small purchase from you will make a big difference to me! Thank you for your support!