Jeff Minter is undoubtedly one of the biggest developers in the retro gaming scene. He’s been developing his distinctive takes on arcade games for over 40 years, and he’s still making them today, with his latest title, I Robot, being released just last month.

Of course, here at Retro News, we like to keep tbs on the latest Jeff Minter developments, having previously reported on Atari’s Jeff Minter Game Jam, and on the physical release of Digital Eclipse’s Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story.


And now, Sheep In Space, LLC, the makers of the documentary featurettes in the aforementioned Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, have produced a full-length documentary exploring the works of Jeff Minter, titled Heart of Neon.

Sheep in Space LLC said that: “Jeff has been a video game developer since the beginning of the 1980s and has outlasted almost every other solo game developer who started at the same time, developing games for nearly every major platform along the way. Through the story of Jeff’s exceptional career is the unique opportunity to witness the video game industry evolving, as seen from the perspective of an outsider. Jeff Minter is a game designer who never gave up, and Heart of Neon is an extraordinary story that no fan of the history of video games can afford to miss!”

Sheep in Space LLC name the key features of Heart of Neon as follows: “The unique inside story about the video games industry, interviews with industry executives from Microsoft, Sony & Atari, interviews with people who know Jeff Minter the best, an intimate portrait of an artist who made video games their life’s work.”

The film’s director, Paul Docherty, has a background in video games himself, and said that: “In the late 1980s I was a video games graphics artist. At the time it was a huge part of my life. The humble business of video games has changed wildly since then… In Jeff Minter’s experience I see the same modest 1980s game developer attitude. He truly is an independent. While he has partnered with many distribution companies over the years, Jeff makes the games he wants to make. It’s the name of his company that goes over the title. Heart of Neon is a film about how rare and special that is.”

The Heart of Neon Kickstarter campaign is set to launch on May 22, 2005, with the aim of the campaign being to raise funds to produce a Blu-Ray edition of the documentary.