The Ultimate-Rare story: 40 years of brilliant British games | Hacker News Reader

The Ultimate-Rare story: 40 years of brilliant British games

theguardian.com

103 pointsmsephton51 comments

I used to work at Rare while they had their 30th anniversary (1985-2015), I'm surprised the article didn't mention Rare Replay: https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/rare-replay/BWXKD3FFM... (included in Xbox Game Pass, Xbox only though). For everyone who tried it near release, it was updated to include GoldenEye 007 fairly recently.

Another anecdote related to Rare Replay was that the N64 emulator is actually in-house because it only needed to support a limited number of games. And for these games, it worked better than the existing emulators. Lots of people were so passionate about Rare Replay, it's a massive nostalgia hit when exploring the games :)

EDIT: not mentioned much as well, Rare Replay also includes a special arcade version of Battletoads for 3 players, excellent fun on Xbox !

Something else I find remarkable about that N64 emulator is that it was built for the Xbox 360 architecture and from Rare Replay's lovely museum interior it boots you into first one emulator (the 360's emulator on One/Series) and then an emulator inside that emulator. It's kind of lovely in that strange beauty of technical wizardry that shouldn't work half as well as it actually works.

That's not true, the Xbox 360 games boot into the Xbox 360 dash that's true, but the N64 emulator does not. It was written from scratch, not for the Xbox 360.

I talked with someone who was writing the 64 emu at the time. He had fun stories of looking the original source code for the games on burned CDs and finding hilarious comments left in the code (I believe chiefly in Conker). Learned that they also kept the original hardware used for some of the development of those old games, even if it might be long-nonfunctional.

So many of my favourite games of the era, all made by a handful of people on a platform with less compute power than my keyboard or mouse.[1]

Incredible.

I still sometimes dream of Alien:8, desolate metal rooms with incomprehensible objects stacked or moving in dangerous ways.

Atic Atac and Sabre Wulf are cemented in my head as amazing, frantic, smooth as butter adventures.

Jetpac was smooth too, it never felt laggy or stuttering. And building that rocket was a major excitement for the 10 year old that I was.

Thank you, Ultimate Play The Game. I really had loads of fun!

[1] Keychron Q10: ARM Cortex-M4 32-bit STM32L43. Ploopy Mouse: ATMega32u4 8MHz

Jet Pac, Attic Atac, sabrewulf, Knightlore. Easily the greatest British games company of all time. They were so far ahead of everyone else, they had to delay the launch of Knightlore because it would have blown Sabrewulf out of the water. They became Rare and then released Donkey Kong Country and then Golden Eye. They were the Rolls Royce of labels.

Perfect Dark for N64 was another Rare masterpiece.

And Banjo Kazooie

Unfortunately, they couldn't repeat their earlier successes after the N64 era. Knightlore was a revelation back in the day, a case of "I can't believe what my eyes are seeing" in terms of graphics and gameplay. It was not very different than Doom years later, but of course in the much more limited scale of the game market of the time.

> Easily the greatest British games company of all time

hmmmm.... Team17 were great too: Superfrog, Worms, Alien Breed, etc.

And so were the Bitmap Brothers: Xenon, Speedball, Gods, Z, etc.

Core, Psygnosis, Superior Software, ... the list goes on.

The list is amazing indeed, from the top of my mind: DMA Design (Lemmings and later GTA series), Frontier (Elite series), Bullfrog (Theme Park, Magic Carpet)

> DMA Design

Which is now Rockstar.

Also can't forget Codemasters

There are tons. I loved Starglider 2, produced by Argonaut Games. It's like No Man's Sky, but is from the 80s.

Bullfrog has that wild legacy of becoming Lionhead, then getting shut down by Microsoft.

It's interesting to see Playground Games now taking over Lionhead's legacy by building a new Fable game. They probably get overlooked as a strong (current) British developer because the Forza Horizon series has been an interestingly subtle niche for them so far, so hopefully the new Fable game will bring them some more (deserved) attention.

The Lionhead legacy goes even deeper, as I remember the lead up and hype for their first game Black and White. You'd have a creature that you didn't control but rather you "taught it" what you wanted it to do. I can't remember if the words neural net were mentioned in some of pieces I read in PC Gamer, but I feel like it might have been. It was going to be a revolution in game AI because it wasn't just a bunch of if-statements or state machines. And who was the hotshot young programmer behind this wizardry? A young Cambridge graduate named Demis Hassabis, who'd previous done level design and other work for Bullfrog as a teenage before attending university!

Of course on the meagre PCs of the day this revolutionary AI didn't quite pan out and you couldn't ever really get your creature to do what you want. And what became of our young AI programmer? Well after a few more years in the game industry he went back to school and continued his pursuit of AI and neural nets and founded a little company that you might have heard of, Deep Mind, aka Google's AI division creating things like AlphaGo and generally kicking off the machine learning revolution we currently find ourselves in.

And to think, you could have had a preview of all of this, like I did, back in 2001 on a janky underpowered PC, cursing at my neural net powered ape creature as I tried to get it to stop crushing my village.

Let's not forget the duds. Tranz Am... Pssst... Technically great but the gameplay was lacking.

But yeah - Jet Pac, Sabrewulf, Knightlore were in a different league to their competition.

Ever heard of Sensible Software?

Someone already mentioned Core Design, but just to highlight:

I worked in Pride Park in Derby in the mid 2000s, and some of my colleagues who'd been there a while told me one day, years before, they looked out of the window and a nearby car park was suddenly full of Ferraris.

What had happened was a small software team in the middle of England had just released the original Tomb Raider. There's a road in Derby[0] named in honour of that moment.

Additionally, I've heard a theory that the reason Rockstar North is called as such is because it would be bad marketing if people knew that the all-American video games series Grand Theft Auto is actually made in Scotland[1]!

[0] https://goo.gl/maps/b5gLjWb7zhUBUq218

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/jhx7MdKZqydF97bX8

I remember reading the address on the back of the Ultimate boxes and seeing 'Ashby de la Zouch', thinking, these are such legends they've just made up a fictional town!

> the underrated Blast Corps

That's putting it mildly. BC was a fantastically frustrating combination of big explosions, annoying puzzles, time pressure, and complete silliness.

That’s a name I’ve not heard in a long while. I hated the controls but loved the game.

I was just playing it yesterday. It gets unbelievably frustrating as the levels get more complex, but then there's the gems like destroying cities with the jetpack guy.

Aside from gameplay that has not aged well, Jet Force Gemini is a hidden gem in the Rare catalog. Deeply atmospheric, a truly epic (in the fullest sense of the word) soundtrack by Robin Beanland, a colorful world of jaw-droppingly large levels full of secrets to explore that made schoolyard gossip exciting...it was a game so experimental and full of new things that it's an exemplar of the start of the 3D era, before any gameplay formulas or publicly-traded buyouts.

I loved that music. I recorded it to minidisc just so I could listen to it on the go.

I remember "speed running" each of the levels of Jet Force Gemini with my friends and recording our times on an old Geocities website. It was the era just before YouTube and capture cards, so we simply relied on honor.

Whether it's adulting or a different set of priorities, I can't really get into games like I used to. But Rare was a gem, and these are fond memories.

Shout out to Viva Piñata and its sequels, an underappreciated game from a few years after Microsoft bought Rare. On the surface it was a silly kids game with a bad TV show tie-in. But underneath it was a remarkably complex sandbox game with some interesting game mechanics for completing a collection. A different take on Pokemon or Stardew Valley (or Harvest Moon, historically). Good stuff.

Viva Piñata is one of my favorite counter-example games to all of the "Rare stopped being what made them great on Nintendo consoles when Microsoft bought them". Viva Piñata never quite found the right audience on the Xbox 360 but it was exactly the sort of fun crazy thing that would have delighted Nintendo audiences in the right lull between Pokemon or Animal Crossing releases.

(My other common counter-example is how Rare's "lost" years where they were pumping out of a lot of Kinect focused games wouldn't seem that "lost" or strange in the context if had it been Rare going all in on Wii games. Also Rare's Kinect games were some of the best and it is a shame that the Kinect is nearly extinct at this point. A lot of people think Rare was "forced" to do all the Kinect games, but interviews from the time showed Rare had such a Nintendo-like delight in the tech, that to me at least always seemed fitting for Rare.)

There was quite the mystique around Ultimate in those early days. So much so in fact that when I was 10 years old there was a conspiracy theory going around that the colours of their logo were a secret nod to an amazing game they would only release if the company ever got into trouble. Yes, this collection of schoolboys believed that Ultimate had created something so incredible and mind blowing that it could only be regretfully unleashed under the most dire of circumstances.

We also sat in from of a Spectrum for 16 hours waiting for the mythical midnight boat ride in Jet Set Willy. We may have been rather gullible.

I don't think I'll ever forgive Microsoft for what they did to Rare. The reorganization in 2010 put the writing on the wall but it was the decade being forced to make stupid, pointless Kinect games nobody played that really buried it. Now Rare's soul is in live-service game hell, being little more than a support studio for Sea of Thieves. I'll be shocked if Everwild ever comes out.

It's hard now to appreciate how strange it was that they got so close to Nintendo so early. The NES was not taken seriously in the UK until the SNES had practically arrived, and even many that were aware thought the Amiga would wipe it out through technical superiority.

What they managed to make the Spectrum do was basically inconceivable.

NES didn't get traction in the UK? That's surprising I would have though with its dominance in North America that would have swept up the UK as well. Maybe not a targeted market?

The UK basically skipped 8 bit consoles in favour of home computers. The mass market shifts were something like Spectrum -> Amiga (500)/Megadrive (the Genesis in NA) -> SNES -> Playstation.

Well I remember going around to friends houses and them having 8 bit consoles.

I'm not convinced we skipped 8-bit consoles! Quite apart from having a bunch of friends at the time who had an NES or Master System, if this magazine can be trusted then Sega sold 150,000 Master Systems in the UK in 1990 alone (after the Mega Drive came out): https://retrocdn.net/images/b/be/SegaPower_UK_18.pdf - page 6

>Amiga (500)/Megadrive

I suspect this is probably based on your specific age (mid 40s?)

I'm a bit younger an knew plenty with a master system, less with a nes.

None with an Amiga?!?

Going to chime in with my favorite one -- Conker's Bad Fur Day. My, what a masterpiece. I definitely wasn't culturally literate enough to get all the humor when I was a kid, but going back to it as an adult, it has aged very well. There are so many elements to the story that have me cracking up laughing.

The story aged well. The controls have not, particularly the excruciating and entirely too long FPS section.

Rab and Ryan from Consolevania kept referring to how good it was, and at first I thought it was an in-joke because it doesn't sound like a classic. But it's genuinely quite a well-respected and critically acclaimed game, even if it didn't become commercially successful.

It is maybe a shame that the "sequel" was lost. Rare built a Conker's Bad Fur Day section in Project Spark. It was delightfully weird and while not as good as the proper game, far better than most of what existed in Project Spark. It also let would be level designers try their own hand at writing Conker into their own weird platformers and try their hand at their own ridiculous parodies in the Conker style. (It wasn't quite Conker's take on "Super Mario Maker", but it had wild potential.)

It was a strange more-adult-oriented IP crossover for a game "creation" tool that seemed most trying to woo the younger-leaning Minecraft and Roblox audiences. Project Spark was an incredible oddity and its shutdown an interesting footnote in part because of that weird crossover.

I think there's no better use of the phrase "hit's different" than when talking about Rare games (or Rareware as we called it when I was a wee bairn).

Retro Gamer magazine have done some great articles on them over the years if you're keen for more nostalgia or just further curious about the origins of the company and influence they've had on modern gaming.

(UK games in general)

I still remember Head over Heels on my Amstrad. And I think I've bought all the Mastertronic games available as they fitted my budget as a kid.

Spindizzy is my all time game favorite since 40 years.

Somehow I always think Turok is from Rare but it's not.

> I think I've bought all the Mastertronic games available

Even “Make Music with Mistertronic”? (Not a game, admittedly.)

No I don't know that one, was it available for Amstrad?

I could only find this for the Commodore 64: <https://archive.org/details/uta_Make_Music_With_Mistertronic...>

I was working at Nintendo of America in the 90's and remember hearing that the Rare guys were working out of their barn. For years they had an email address for the chickens as a joke. Wonder if it still works :)

Is the Ultimate ZX Spectrum abandonware still denied to be publicly distributed?

You'll have to explain...

https://archive.is/q7BZB

Atic Atac 2 when

The managers at Microsoft are probably too young to remember the original.

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