Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story review - classic games, now with fascinating context

The black screen has a single white dot at its centre. The expectation is that we’re in for something like Pong: something simple, direct, immediate and, as far as games are concerned, ancient.

But then the dot moves, and in its wake we get eruptions of light. Blocks of colour fan out, moving from pink to purple to cyan. The light creates shapes, but what are these shapes? Starbursts, nebula, volcanic eruptions. The screen seems to mirror the action, double it, so we get a lot of crabs with two pincers raised to the sky, a lot of mermaids with two fins, a lot of Rorschach blots. Maybe that’s it. You look at these dancing lights, these ripples of colour, all caused by the single white dot, and you see what you want to see.

This is Psychedelia, from 1984. It was the first of designer Jeff Minter’s light synths, inspired by the colours and shapes he’d see when he lay around in his room, listening to “the Floyd”. I always knew Minter made light synths, because his later games, like Space Giraffe, are often set inside them. But coming across Psychedelia mid-way through Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, I got to appreciate them in a new way.