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.