Zach’s Awesome Web Site

Neon is actually a light synthesizer which was developed a computer and video game designer called Jeff “Yak” Minter, currently a component of the Xbox 360 console, the video game console made by Microsoft in a futile attempt to compete with Sony’s PlayStation franchise and Nintendo’s Wii. This music visualization program that has also been used in some video games like Space Giraffe and Space Invaders Extreme was co-authored by Ivan Zorzin. The Neon was supposed to be a video game, called Unity, which the Lionhead Studios and Jeff Minter were building for the Nintendo GameCube platform sometime in 2003 and 2004, with a never revealed big name in music business providing the soundtrack. Although the expectations were high, anticipation was immense; the project was never finalized and finally cancelled by the end of 2004.
Jeff Minter is a forty seven years old programmer who went into programming because he got ill in the secondary school and was confined to bed for three months. He was interested in computer languages, but never attempted to really get into it, until he was bedridden and did it out of boredom. When he got better, he started with a friend to program games for the Commodore PET. Later he partnered up with his mom and released as a twenty year old about twenty commercially exploited games for various platforms.
In 1982 he founded his own software company and named it Llamasoft. The company produced dozens of games, including Hellgate, Gridrunner, Mutant Camels series, and many more, creating a distinctive style that culminated in the creation of the VLM-2 Light Synth. When work begun in 2002 on Unity, the idea was to create the ultimate virtual light machine, the VLM-3, also called Neon. Unity was supposed to be a smart combination of light synthesis and a shoot ’em up arcade game.
Although Unity never got finalized, the Neon concept was reprogrammed and updated, expanded as far as possible and was picked up by Microsoft as the media visualization solution for their new Xbox 360 console. The alliance with Microsoft is still very much active, Llamasoft released for the Xbox 360 the Space Giraffe action game, arcade style gameplay based loosely on the classic Tempest, but propelled by the Neon Xbox 360 light synthesizer visualization engine that is a component of the integrated Xbox software.
The most recent release of the Space Invaders franchise, Space Invaders Extreme, currently out in the second installment, was partly created by Llamasoft as well, providing the visualization aspects of the game. At the same time, the popular Space Giraffe was released for the PC Windows platform as well.

Video synthesizer is the visual pendant of the audio synthesizer, therefore it is a contraption that is supposed to make, create, generate electronically a video signal, without having an actual camera input. Because such imagery is closely related to video effects used in TV broadcasts, the two basically different devices overlap, and many video synthesizers can accept, distort, clean up and enhance TV imagery, usually in real time. A video synthesizer is expected to be able to generate a wide array of electronically manipulated imagery and output it as a video signal. This signal should be viewed by means of conventional equipment such as TV monitors, video projectors, VGA computer displays and similar.
While synthesizer imagery can be either static, evolving or even moving, any king of patterns can be created, including geometric imagery, text characters of any desired font even weather maps. The requirement of immediate performance in real time was always expected, because video synthesizers were created for live TV broadcasts. Such video synthesizers existed long before similar video synthesizing engines were developed for computers. These analog video synthesizers were mainly used by television and also by video artists, who engaged in electronic performance art projects.
The translation into the digital world did not go as easy as it may have seemed. The change of perception in concept needed to take place first. Despite problems, first digital video synthesizers did use digital oscillators that were linked to generate timing ramps and horizontal and vertical frames. One of the first to use analogue and digital techniques would be the EMS Spectre in 1974. The first full digital video synthesizer was designed by Ed Tannenbaum, a video artist, who developed it for an interactive museum exhibit, by using parts of an Apple II computer with a four bit frame buffer. The installation was called Recollections, the video synthesizer was later named Chromachron.
In recent times video synthesizers are as common as the Windows media player. Yes, the quirky pulsating stuff that is moving in sync with the music, called visualizations, that is also a video synthesizer. One of the more sophisticated video synthesizer concepts is Neon, developed by Jeff Minter for a never realized video game, called Unity. It is currently being used in a revamped version for the Xbox 360 as the visualization engine. Digital video synthesizers have been used for live performances of such music greats like Pink Floyd, but also by Jean Michel Jarre. Every single TV broadcasting unit that is having a special effects module, also has a video synthesizer module integrated. It seems that video synthesizers have become an intricate part of our lives.

Michael Jackson may have first made his name with some stunning music, but his show business longevity could be attributed mostly to personal strangeness, and regular stories in the media about elephant man’s bones, fascinating criminal investigations and sundry spectacles. Amid everything that he brought to entertainment, his contributions in music and film, not to mention his personal life, stands an obscure but important achievement in the area of video games: the Michael Jackson Moonwalker arcade game.

Around time that Michael Jackson’s Bad album came out, height of his career, the singer in collaboration with Sega the video game company, built on Jackson’s showbiz persona to create a video game named Moonwalker. The videogame is made in separate versions for arcade machines and for Sega Genesis home consoles. At the time, this was quite a groundbreaking idea, to give fans a celebrity a chance to experience his or her persona through the videogame, one that used real outtakes from the star’s CDs no less.

The premise of the game was that the player helped Michael Jackson’s character in the game heroically rescue children from a villain named Mr. Big. It can only be seen as ironic that Michael Jackson became embroiled in problems to do with crimes against children himself a few years after the game came out.

The arcade version of the game allowed up to two players to play the game at the same time, each in control of a Michael Jackson character dressed in white or red just the same as in his smooth criminal video. When Michael Jackson fought with the bad guys, his fighting steps were dance moves, and dispatching his enemies with its recognizable high-air dance kicks, spins and other trademark moves. A bit of Michael Jackson trivia that was popular at the time was the fact that he owned a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles; to bring a little bit more entertainment interests into the game, the chimp Bubbles was made a part of the game as well. If a player tries to pick the chimp up, Michael Jackson’s character would suddenly turn into robot can go about fighting with lasers.

The arcade game is quite an endearing and enduring cult hit; and manages somehow to sum up the feel of the early 90s. Animated outtakes from the game have been used for years all over to represent Michael Jackson on TV and on the Internet. The home game console version was much tamer than the arcade version. It was a bland game of the usual continually -scrolling background for which Michael Jackson did his fighting. Basically the game survived on its graphics of the dancelike fighting moves and the times that Jackson made and his signature high-pitched squeal when he succeeded. While the arcade version had real Michael Jackson music for the background, the home version was in town with nothing more than simplistic MIDI tunes of the stars famous Beat It and Smooth Criminal numbers.

There were precious few other video game appearances that Michael Jackson undertook: in space Channel 5 That for Sega’s Dreamcast home console, and in the boxing game Ready 2 Rumble. Not long before Michael Jackson passed away, there was talk of a videogame come back; it was rumored that there were going to be Michael Jackson games for the PlayStation and Wii consoles. It was however not be.