But I was more interested in hearing about the next game from the company, the tentatively-titled Gridrunner+++. According to Minter, Microsoft has been sitting on a version of the colorful shooter for some time without providing any feedback:
We sent it off to [Microsoft] months ago, but they've just not said anything - we're just waiting for them. Basically I'm going to carry on with the PC version of it if I don't hear from them soon, because they're just sitting on the demo we sent them three or four months ago. We haven't heard a thing.
That sounds like it would be pretty frustrating, but it's not entirely out of line with things I've heard from other smaller developers attempting to put content out on Xbox Live Arcade. Sounds like Microsoft has quite the bottleneck going these days of cool games that have yet to be announced or extensively discussed but are practically complete. Even games that have been discussed here and there frequently get caught in some sort of weird release limbo. You'd think that everyone would have gotten a bit more organized with all this digital download stuff by now and that we'd be able to have an actual game release calendar for Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and PlayStation Network instead of weekly announcements of games that most potential buyers didn't even know existed in the first place.
Anyway, the Jeff Minter interview is worth taking a look at. He's certainly one of the gaming industry's more fascinating specimens.