Feature
Table of Contents

Introduction
Playing the Ultimate Game
Ultimacy Becomes a Rarity
Platform of the Apes
The Third Dimension

A History Lesson
Playing the Ultimate Game

In an age when video games were still a rare commodity in the living rooms, two brothers' fascination in computers and electronic games marked the first vertiges of what would ultimately become the company that nowadays goes by the name of Rare. Christopher Stamper, now in his early forties, and his three years younger brother Timothy grew up in the peaceful British town of Ashby de la Zouch, located midway between Birmingham and Nottingham, and were hooked by video games right from the first Pong machines.

In the late seventies, Chris Stamper entered Loughborough University, where he was first introduced to the wonders of computers. After graduating from college with a degree in physics and electronics, he decided to devote his life to programming and took a job with a games manufacturing firm. He would spend two years with computer companies before deciding to apply his expertise and experience to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which he had programmed on during his spare time.

Chris teamed up with his brother Tim, who dropped out of his technical design course at Leicester Poly (today called De Montfort University), a college friend John Lathbury, and Tim's girlfriend Carole Ward, who was later to be his wife. With their feet firmly rooted in the brisk coin-op business, they founded Ashby Computers and Graphics Ltd. in 1982 and developed a couple of little known arcade conversion kits before starting to trade as Ultimate Play the Game.

They were also joined by the Stampers' brother Stephen and sister Louise, and the venture was supported by their father John, making the Stamper family the company's axis. The Ultimate staff settled down in a terraced house next to the Stamper parents' newsagent in Ashby and spent the first six months concentrating on its first Spectrum game, a space platformer titled Jetpac.

Reaching for the Stars

Just a couple of weeks following its quiet appearance in the early summer of 1983, Jetpac made Ultimate Play the Game a household name in the British gaming market. Despite its simplistic and repetitive locations, the game proved to be exceptionally addictive. It became a commercial success and sold an astonishing figure of 330,000 units over a base of one million Spectrum machines, surpassing the officially claimed best-seller by a wide margin.

Before the summer of 1983 came to an end, Jetpac was joined by three more Ultimate titles. Spectrum users lusting for more addictive fun soon found themselves spraying nasty insects in Pssst, racing for golden cups in Tranz Am, and chasing escaped ingredients in Cookie. Ultimate's first offerings were met with praise from consumers and media alike, and each release was eagerly awaited by aficionados throughout the country.

After only releasing games for the Spectrum with 16K of memory, the beginning of 1984 saw the launch of Ultimate's first 48K titles. In the side scroller Lunar Jetman, a pseudo-sequel to Ultimate's first game, the player takes on the role of Jetman on his unenviable quest to save the earth. In Atic Atac, one of the first arcade adventures, the objective is to escape from a haunted castle by locating the key to the only exit, the main doors.

Ultimate eventually branched out to other home computer markets and ported its titles to popular 8bit platforms such as the Amstrad, MSX, and BBC. However, since the internal staff was busy working on Spectrum games, the developer appointed freelance teams to produce the other versions. It also released six original Commodore 64 titles, of which the first two ^___ The Staff of Karnath and Entombed ^___ became smash-hits.

Teaching an Old Wolf New Tricks

In an attempt to eliminate a considerable amount of the alarmingly large number of illegal copies that was haunting the gaming industry, Ultimate raised the price of its games, setting it at almost twice that of previous releases. The first title to adopt the new price tag was Sabre Wulf, an arcade adventure game released in the summer of 1984. Despite the price increase, it became the developer's best selling game on the Spectrum and was shortly accompanied by a sequel in Underwurlde.

In late 1984, a press release announcing that Knight Lore, the third title in the immensely popular Sabreman franchise, was to feature an entirely unique and revolutionary three-dimensional concept dubbed Filmation had the videogaming community quivering with anxiety. Its pioneering isometric 3D perspective did indeed stretch the industry's perception of the technological capabilities of the ageing Spectrum and brought about a spate of imitations.

There is no doubt that Knight Lore was ahead of its time, but what no one could have possibly imagined was that the title was completed long before Sabre Wulf was unleashed on the games-craving public. Fearing that releasing it early would affect the sales of its forerunner, Ultimate decided the market wasn't ready for Knight Lore and sat on it while Sabre Wulf was raking in the money.

Having paved the way for the isometric genre with Knight Lore, Ultimate was keen to raise the bar even further and soon delivered its most polished achievement in Alien 8, a futuristic adventure set in an alien-invaded spaceship. It is unarguably the pinnacle of Ultimate's accomplishments on the Spectrum computers and was shortly followed by the less-acclaimed Nightshade and Gunfright.

Silence is Golden

Ultimate was one of the few videogames developers that deliberately stayed out of the limelight. With the exception of one early appearance at a Microfair show, the company always steered clear of exhibitions, never granted the press any interviews or exclusive coverage of forthcoming games, and didn't even advertise for programmers.

The developer's reticence towards the outer world, which generated a fair amount of frustration among many fanatics and gaming magazines, was never intentional ^___ the small development house was always busy working on its next game and thus found no time to speak to the media ^___ but when Ultimate realised it had created an almost appealing sense of mystery that increased the games-buying public's interest in its products, it saw no reason to break its press silence.

introduction

chapter two