Ultimate Play the Game

~ the obituary ~

Tim and Chris Stamper had already built arcade hardware for other people when they set up Ashby Computers and Graphics in 1982, with their friend John Lathbury and Tim's girlfriend Carole Ward. The company sat in a house next to the family newsagent in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, a Leicestershire town of about twelve thousand people, and it started out making conversion kits for arcade cabinets. Ashby shipped four coin-op titles under its own name, Blue Print for Bally-Midway and three more for Jaleco. Then it turned to the home computer market and began trading under a second name, Ultimate Play the Game.

Jetpac arrived in May 1983 for the 16K ZX Spectrum and sold over 300,000 copies, which gave a company of five people a turnover above a million pounds inside its first year. The 16K target was deliberate. Tim Stamper told an interviewer that year they could finish two 16K games in a month against one 48K game, so the small machine was simply faster money. Pssst followed in June and Tranz Am after it, then Cookie. Four of the ten games ever pressed onto ROM cartridges for the ZX Interface 2 were Ultimate's.

The 48K releases came at the end of 1983 with Lunar Jetman and Atic Atac, and 1984 brought Sabre Wulf at 350,000 copies on the Spectrum alone. Ultimate took the Golden Joystick for Best Software House in both 1983 and 1984, and for a stretch there its release schedule was treated by the British gaming press as a weather event rather than a product announcement.

It ended without a closure notice. The Stampers sold a minority stake to U.S. Gold in 1985 and put their real work into a separate firm, Rare Limited. U.S. Gold published nothing new under the Ultimate name after Bubbler in 1987, and in 1988 the label appeared for the last time on a retrospective compilation of games that were already old.

~ the case file ~

~ the big box ~

Sabre Wulf shipped at £9.95 when a Spectrum arcade game cost £5.50. The reasoning Ultimate gave was anti-piracy: charge enough that the buyer feels the purchase, and the buyer is less likely to run off copies for the whole class. The packaging changed at the same time, from a cassette inlay to an oversized box with artwork on it, partly to justify the price and partly to make the thing look like an object worth owning rather than a tape.

That strategy assumes a market where buying is the normal case and copying is the exception, and it was aimed at a shelf in a British newsagent. Turkey in the mid-eighties had home computers but not that retail layer, and a cassette here was something you got from somebody who already had it. The premium price and the box around it were arguments made to a customer I was not, in a year I was in primary school.

~ filmation ~

Knight Lore came out late in 1984 and drew its rooms in forced-perspective isometric 3D, a technique Ultimate branded Filmation. Nothing else on an 8-bit machine looked like it. Ocean copied the style directly in Batman and Head Over Heels, and a generation of British bedroom coders spent 1985 working out how the mask routines were done. Edge later called it probably the single largest advance in the history of computer games, which is the kind of sentence a magazine writes twenty years after the fact, but the contemporary reviews were not much calmer.

In a 1988 interview with CRASH, Tim Stamper said Knight Lore was actually finished before Sabre Wulf and deliberately held back, because releasing it would have killed the sales of the comparatively primitive game they had ready first. Later analysis of the code suggests he was overstating it, since the Knight Lore routines are far more optimized than a game from the same window would be. Either way the company was sitting on its best work and choosing a release order for it, which is not how a bedroom outfit behaves.

~ the second company ~

Rare was already appearing in game credits before the U.S. Gold deal closed. The Stampers had spent 1984 and 1985 reverse engineering the Nintendo Entertainment System, and what they built the new company for was Nintendo hardware rather than the Spectrum. In late 1988 Rare bought back the rights it had sold to U.S. Gold, and the Ultimate name went into a drawer for eighteen years.

Microsoft bought Rare in 2002 for $377 million, at the time a record price for a game developer. In 2006 Rare put the Ultimate Play the Game logo back on one Xbox Live Arcade release, a remake called Jetpac Refuelled, and in 2015 the old titles turned up again inside Rare Replay. A label can outlive the company that earned it by a long way when the people who own it never quite stopped being sentimental about the town it came from.

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