Quote:And this time there's no possibility of things going tits-up like happened with Unity - it's done and dusted, it exists and is already inside the OS of the Xbox360 Smile. You WILL be getting your hands on this one Smile.

Quote:I know there will also probably be a few who are disappointed or even upset at what they will doubtless see as me climbing into bed with the Evil Empire... well, the simple fact is that it was Microsoft who gave me the shot. Ninty and Sony both know what I do, but nobody was calling me up with any interest in making a next-gen lightsynth. Microsoft were the ones who believed in it enough to give us a shot, and by Goat, given an opportunity like that, I'd have to be stupid not to take it.

Look at the current state of play with visualisers. On both major platforms they are still using pretty much the same techniques as I was using back on the Jaguar. For more than ten years they've been iterating endless variations of the "jiggly dots in a bit of feedback" stuff and it's started to make the whole field look stagnant and boring whereas in fact it should be fantastic and vibrant and exciting. Somebody needed to come in and lay down a bit of shock and awe and Microsoft gave us the chance to do just that. The whole field will end up benefitting as a result. It would have been a massive dereliction of duty to the artform I've spent twenty years pursuing *not* to take the chance.

And we haven't sold our souls, or our IP, to Microsoft either. We've created for them an interactive visualiser for the Xbox360, and we'll not do a visualiser for the rival consoles for this coming generation. But if someone were to ring me up tomorrow and say "Blimey Yak mate, that Neon's a bit tasty, any chance of a bit of that for the next $not_a_console_visualiser_app" I could quite legitimately say "abso-smegging-lutely!" and we could be delivering working code in a few weeks. We can use it in games on *any* platform. The engine is small, efficient and portable. In taking this opportunity we've funded the development of our engine, raised the profile of lightsynths in general and the Neon technology in particular, and opened up all kinds of future possibilities for work for Llamasoft. I fully expect we will get *significant* follow-on work from this. I'm fully grateful to Microsoft for that.

Most of all - come on, you know me, it's never been about selling my soul to the highest bidder... this work is a labour of love for me. Nothing has shone as brightly and so close to my soul as this work. It's been my Light, even when at times everything else in my life seemed dark. Ever since I first started working on lightsynths my prime impulse has always been to get something I thought was wonderful more widely known, and with this work, after 20 years trying, we've finally pushed it out there in a *massive* way. *Millions* of people are going to plug in these boxes and discover that they've got something beautiful that they never knew of before. That's *wonderful*. It's a dream of 20 years coming true.

Go to the website and read the whole history of the lightsynths. Then tell me I'm a bad man for doing what I've done. Me, I'm fully proud and happy that Microsoft like our lightsynth enough to build it into the heart of their next-generation machine. That's awesome. I'm chuffed to bits to be working with them.