Jeff Minter making Tempest 2000-3000 sequel called Space Giraffe for Xbox 360

Space Giraffe Xbox 360 Live Arcade
Jeff Minter, is the creator of 8-bit classics like Gridrunner, Mama Llama, and Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar. On his blog he posted some screenshots of his latest game, Space Giraffe, due to be released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007.

To quote Jeff Minter: “It’s my XBLA game which is a sequel to Tempest 2000/3000. The main character is the Space Giraffe (and now it seems that people are referring to the whole game as Space Giraffe).” The game will also support the Xbox Live Vision camera, and will cost 400 Microsoft points ($5). Minter continued:

“You’ll also get new Neon (aka Xbox 360 music visualizer) effects supporting the webcam input as unlockables. That’s to make up for the fact that Microsoft stiffed me on doing a proper new version of Neon to truly support the cam, and instead have done some half-assed thing where they just superimpose some cam effect layers over existing Neon. I figure that was a bit rude, so I’ll put some proper cam-Neon stuff in the new game by way of schooling ;-)”

In December 2004, developer Llama Soft and publisher Lionhead Studios announced that the GameCube exclusive Unity had been cancelled. While obviously the technology behind the game was used in the recently co-authored built-in Xbox 360 music visualizer. It now seems like we might still see that cancelled game revived in Space Giraffe on Xbox Live Arcade.