1096: Colourspace

I wrote a thing about veteran independent game developer Jeff Minter the other day for Games Are Evil — you should go read it, then go buy all the iOS games I listed in that article, as they’re all fab.

For me, though, some of Jeff Minter’s most memorable creations weren’t games at all — they were what he called “light synthesisers”. The first of these was Psychedelia for the 8-bit computers of the time, superceded the following year by Colourspace, which is where I first became aware of… whatever lightsynths actually are.

Essentially, a lightsynth — as it existed back then, anyway — is a piece of software that allows you to play with colours and shapes as you see fit. In the case of the Atari 8-bit version of Colourspace, which is where I first encountered it, you used the joystick to move a cursor around the screen, then held the fire button and moved around to make shapes, colours and swirly patterns. The exact behaviour of the program could be tweaked in various ways, too, allowing for colour-cycling, variable pixel sizes — something the Atari was good at due to a nifty little feature called Display List Interrupts — and for the colours and shapes to flow over or under static on-screen graphics such as logos. Minter notes on his website that for a long time, this was his “performance lightsynth” of choice, and he often showed it off as a means of demonstrating both what he and the hardware of the time were capable of. (He also claims he sold a copy to Paul Daniels and was subsequently rude to him when he phoned up for technical support.)

The 16-bit era saw a new version of Colourspace released for the Atari ST. The shift to a platform that is much closer to what we understand as being a “PC” today meant that Minter could take advantage of things like mouse control for more fluid movement of the shapes, colours and patterns, and the relatively large amount of memory in the ST (512K or a whopping 1MB!) meant that performers could load a selection of images and switch between them at will to help supplement their dancing swirly patterns. Minter himself performed using Colourspace for the ST on a number of occasions, including hiring out the London Planetarium for a laser-and-Colourspace extravaganza to celebrate the new version’s launch.

Following Colourspace came Trip-A-Tron, an evolution of the formula that still allowed for simple real-time swirly patterns, but also featured its own scripting language allowing clever people (cleverer than I was at that tender age) to remotely control other computers running Trip-A-Tron via the MIDI port, triggering various animations, rendering scenes in 2D and 3D and all manner of other exciting things. I never really got deep into Trip-A-Tron because the thickness of the manual was somewhat disconcerting for a youngster like I was then — Minter notes it took him longer to write that manual than it did to write some of his earlier lightsynths!

One thing that does stick in my mind from Trip-A-Tron, however, is a peculiar artistic project Minter undertook with a musician named Adrian Wagner known as Merak. Merak was a wordless, abstract story about the adventures of an android in space, and it was a spectacular combination of psychedelic visuals and memorable music that I can still remember today. Disappointingly, there don’t appear to be any clips from Merak anywhere on YouTube, but Wagner did rerelease the video on DVD more recently — I’m quite tempted to pick up a copy, but worried that my memories of this remarkable work won’t match up to the reality.

The really interesting thing about this whole “lightsynth” concept of Minter’s is that it was one of the first real examples of computers being used for pure creativity and self-expression. It was entirely what you made of it, and it was fuel for the imagination. I remember vividly spending hours at a time playing with the Atari ST version of Colourspace, which allowed you to render starfields and came with a preset background that looked like the bridge of a spaceship. I’d imagine a grand space opera, rendering the abstract shapes and spectacular light shows of this vessel flying into combat, putting up a brave fight and being eventually destroyed. I’d swirl the mouse around to create abstract shapes and trails, adjust the colour-cycling patterns to change the atmosphere and eventually fill the screen with an explosion of colourful particles as the ship, in my mind, blew to pieces.

Minter’s latest lightsynth is known as Neon, and a version of it comes built in to every Xbox 360 console as the music visualiser. The sad thing is that the frustrations Minter expressed in the article I linked to above mean that it’s unlikely we’ll see a new lightsynth from this eccentric genius any time soon. His tweets on the subject pretty much speak for themselves.

The end of an era, to be sure. Unless anyone’s up for crowdfunding a new Colourspace?