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Atari/Jeff Minter game jam results, Llamasoft, and ST Format

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 09 May 2025 17:03:00 +0000

So, my game HERD NERD is a winner in the “I, REBEL” game jam, hosted by Atari and Jeff Minter.

We are delighted to let you know after hours of play and deliberation - Jeff Minter himself chose your game as THIRD PLACE WINNER

Your game stood out in all the right ways: creative, clever, weird and totally nailing the theme. The team (and the judges!) were blown away by your take on the theme and your execution.

✨ What an honour! ✨

All three winners receive the same prize, but honestly I am more excited to hear why Jeff, Giles, and Jason liked my game. So many nice words to spur me on!

The Results

You can hear more about the game jam and the winning games on the latest Atari podcast episode on YouTube or your favourite podcast listening point. You’ll also learn a bit about the famous Superlambanana sculpture and the infamous Sven Bømwøllen video game. You have been warned!

HERD NERD

You can download and play HERD NERD for free/PWYC on Mac and PC. So check it out! Have fun.

Back in the day

It’s July 1991 and I’ve just walked back from Lewis Meeson’s newsagent to my family home clutching the latest monthly ST FORMAT, issue 24. I’d browsed the magazine in-store to make sure it was worth £2.95 of my hard-earned pocket money, and was eager to try out the software included on the 3.5” floppy disk. This was pre-internet and that was the easiest way of getting hold of a selection of new software. The same thing applied to Amiga, Macintosh, PC, and more.

Today I dug out my actual magazine from storage and my nostalgia dial went all the way up to 11.

Llamatron was my first encounter with Jeff Minter and his weird and wonderful type of game. I played it a lot, mostly in 2-player with the droid or other members of my family. Enemies like sentient cans of cola or screaming Mandelbrot patterns are scorched into my memory forever more.

But it wasn’t just Llamatron that was so great in this issue, I also remember using the Revenge document displayer (with no internet we used to read a lot of text files that were included on the disks, like the Llamatron manual and readme about it being distributed in a new-fangled way known as Shareware). And also Little Green Selector which replaced the standard file selector with one that had fully-featured file manager functionality, though eventually I migrated to the even more amazing Universal Item Selector III which was one of many such replacements. It really was a different era.

Elsewhere in the magazine is a list of Jeff’s favourite games of all time (as of mid-1991). I love that he put his own game at number 1. And then to also include 2 more of his games. What a rock star! Click the image to zoom. Below you’ll find a full list of games with links to read more.

A yak’s favourite games (of all time), 1991

Playing old 32-bit iOS games in 2021

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 23:59:00 +0000

With the introduction of iOS 11 in 2017 Apple stopped supporting 32-bit apps on iOS. This event came to be known as the app-ocalypse with users forced to stay on iOS 10 to keep their apps or upgrade and abandon them. I seem to remember I stuck around on iOS 10 for a while but eventually succumbed to the upgrade and said good by to a bunch of stuff.

At this time, I was still managing my iPhone and app updates through iTunes, with a weird ritual of downloading the latest updates to my Mac. It was useful for keeping on top of what I had installed and deleting apps I was no longer interested in. Around the same time Llamasoft were disillusioned with the App Store and pulled all of their games.

Anyway, I took one or both of those things as a sign to download and backup a couple of games in particular: Llamasoft’s Minotron: 2112 and Gridrunner, part of their Minotaur Project series of games. I bought a few more from that series but I only kept my two favourites.

Earlier this year I uploaded them to internet archive as an act of preservation. Somebody recently downloaded them and was trying to make them work on their devices, without much luck. It seemed that the apps were tied to my account and I’d have to share decrypted versions. I’d need an old device capable of running iOS 10 or older, and one susceptible to jailbreaking. I figured that would be a fun afternoon. Here’s the process I went through:

Restore working system

Bought a used device that supports iOS 10 (or earlier, if you prefer)
Downgraded my device to iOS 10.3.3 using leetdown
Installed my two .ipa files using Apple Configurator 2
Confirmed that the games work by playing a little of each

Jailbreaking the device

Installed sockH3lix
Did jailbreak with sockH3lix (only takes a second or two!)
Noted that Cydia has been installed
Installed Clutch (took a couple of tries to find a working repo)

Decrypt the Minotron game

Installed OpenSSH via Cydia
Logged in over SSH from my Mac
Ran Clutch -b uk.co.llamasoft.minotron
SFTP in from my Mac and copy the decrypted .ipa to my Mac

Video

I could capture the attract loop using QuickTime Player but for some reason the recording crashed whenever a sound was played.

And here’s an Instagram video of me playing the main game, albeit quite badly is I’m only using one hand!

Gridrunner

For some reason Clutch and other decrypting apps don’t work for me with Gridrunner. Since then, somebody was kind enough to create a decrypted version and upload it to Internet Archive.

Playing Old Llamasoft iPhone & iPad games

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Back in 2017 a large number of games and apps were rendered obsolete when iOS 11 removed 32-bit compatibility: the appocalypse. At that time I was still downloading apps into iTunes as backups, and seem to have put aside some of these great Llamasoft games—Gridrunner and Minotron: 2112. What foresight!

Since then, with the help of others, I’ve tracked down the rest, and we now have all nine games of the Minotaur Project — Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin’s run of iOS games — preserved and available.

You should be able to side load them onto any jailbroken iOS device running iOS 10 or earlier, like an iPad mini (1st generation will be usable as-is; later generations may need to be downgraded), iPod touch (1st to 5th generation will be usable as-is; later generations may need to be downgraded) or similar iPhone.

I’m still hoping for an easy way to play these on modern devices, so let me know if such a thing exists!

#	Game Archive	Genre	Release date	Web
1	Minotaur Rescue	Twin-stick shooter	2011-01-05	website
2	Minotron: 2112	Twin-stick shooter	2011-02-23	website
3	Deflex	Action puzzle	2011-07-08	website
4	Goat Up	Platformer	2011-09-06	website
5	Caverns of Minos	Cave shooter	2012-01-19	website
6	Gridrunner	Shoot ‘em up	2012-02-17	website
7	Five a Day	Multidirectional shooter	2012-04-02	website
8	Super Ox Wars	Vertical shoot ‘em up	2012-06-24	website
9	Goat Up 2	Platformer	2013-03-06	website

Most games work on iPhone, iPod touch & iPad. Some game pages also include beta PC versions.

Edit, 2021-09-13: I’ve added a decrypted version of Minotron: 2112 that should be easier to install on a jailbroken device.

Edit, 2025-02-06: I can’t remember when exactly, but a kind somebody provided me with a decrypted version of Gridrunner which I’ve now uploaded to its page.

Edit, 2026-07-03: updated the blog post to reference all the games in the Minotaur Project, and added their release dates.