Retro gamers, rejoice: Legendary game designer Jeff Minter’s debut game for iOS, Minotaur Rescue, is ready for download. It’ll set you back a buck.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]Minter describes Minotaur Rescue as inspired by classic games for the Atari 2600 video game console like Asteroids and Space War. The game involves a rescue mission (save the minotaurs) and a defense mission (protect the sun from rocks). There are a few twists, as well.

It’s the first game in a series that Minter’s company, Llamasoft, calls the Minotaur Project.

“The basic idea of the Minotaur Project is to release a lot of simple, fun games made in the style of various iconic old hardware platforms – the Atari VCS in this case,” writes Minter in a recent blog post on the Llamasoft Web site.

Controls have been optimized for iOS and modern effects have been added, plus there are other accoutrements like Game Center and OpenFeint support, but the intent is to invoke those classic video games of yore. There’s even a couple of goodies, like a Tanks game and a Jets game thrown in for good measure. Plus it’s universal – the game runs natively on both the iPhone/iPod touch and the iPad.

Minter is a British computer game designer and developer whose bona fides stretch back to the pioneer days of video games. He designed and produced commercial games for for the Sinclair ZX81, Commodore VIC-20, Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and other systems. He made Tempest 2000 for the Atari Jaguar (later released for the Mac as well), and even tried his hand at Xbox games with Space Giraffe, a title released for the Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Arcade.

Here’s a video of Minotaur Rescue in action:

minotaur playing minotaur from Jeff Minter on Vimeo.