Early releases, such as Jetpac and Pssst, reveal an imagination and an 'arcade quality' approach to home computer games. These games ran in 16Kb too - they would work on any Spectrum. Ultimate were to receive some criticism from other software houses - such as Imagine - for these "simplistic" games. Of course, if you can find any Imagine game that people are still playing fifteen years after it's initial release...

Despite the high quality of their early output, the turning point for them was probably Atic Atac. This game defined 'Arcade Adventure' with its mix of puzzles and fast action. The player had to balance exploration and puzzle solving with a constant battle against all manner of beasties, and a need to keep replenishing his strength with food goodies littered around the environment. You couldn't just keep blasting at things! (Okay, you could - but there was more to playing the game than that).

The follow-up to Atic Atac was possibly their most famous moment - Sabre Wulf. There's little that can be said about Sabre Wulf - you simply have to sit down and experience it at some point in your life. After Sabre Wulf came Knight Lore, and another genre (the 'isometric' adventure) was defined. In hindsight, Ultimate perhaps over-ploughed this type of game in the end, but that's not to detract from the fact that they pretty much invented the 'isometric 3-d' game.

Knight Lore is a genuine classic and remains totally playable today. It's mixture of incredibly distinctive graphics (which pushed the boundaries of the Speccy back considerably) and engaging gameplay, coupled with a tight learning curve that kept you just the right side of frustrated, meant that the game spawned a thousand imitators. In the same month the company released Underwurlde - which was a different take on the arcade adventure theme again (and with Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore remain my 'must see' suggestions for anyone who never saw them originally).

Astonishingly, it later transpired that Knight Lore was finished before Sabre Wulf, but the Stampers decided that the Spectrum world just wasn't ready for something like Knight Lore, and that releasing it too soon might hurt sales of Sabre Wulf. So Sabre Wulf was released in the summer (and sold phenomenally well, too) and Knight Lore was kept back until that December.

If you want to see just how far ahead of their peers Ultimate were - compare Sabre Wulf with any mid-1984 Spectrum game. And then load up Knight Lore. And then recall which one of those two classic games was completed for release first...

Anyway, after this, there was Alien8 (which was similar in look and feel to Knight Lore, but with a more polished puzzle element and set in space) and Nightshade, which was possibly the technical high point of what could be done with the Spectrum. Nightshade suffered from having some gameplay flaws, and I don't believe it quite enjoyed the success of it's earlier stablemates.

Finally they released Gunfright, which was effectively Nightshade with a different graphical theme and a few extra bits of gameplay. It was panned in some quarters for being 'more of the same' - Ultimate finding it hard to live up to the impossibly high standards that they themselves had earlier set - although the sniping at Gunfright was a little unfair, as it was certainly a better game than Nightshade.

After Gunfright, the label continued to release software (of a much poorer standard) to an increasingly indifferent market. The close-knit team who had worked on the earlier classic titles were now busily working on a different hardware platform, and the latter Ultimate titles were programmed by different, 'out-of-house' teams.

With the Ultimate label sold to US Gold, our heroes re-emerged as Rare....

....whom you might have heard of if you've ever played with Nintendo's :)

Rare were responsible for Killer Instinct and the Donkey Kong Country series on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES to us normal folk). Having bought a second-hand SNES and managing to get hold of Killer Instinct and second hand copies of the Donkey Kong Country series, I can confirm that their standards on this platform were as high as they were on the Speccy. Although Killer Instinct is not my kind of game, the DKC games are brilliant fun to play and retain that 'learning curve' element which means that although I don't beat it for long, I get just a little further in every game...

More recently, on the N64, they've produced the massively underrated Blast Corps, the absolutely brilliant Goldeneye, the Super Mario 64-esque Banjo-Kazooie, the sublime Jet Force Gemini (my fave game at the time of writing this), the innovative and envelope-pushing Perfect Dark and many others.

And as the Nintendo Gamecube prepares to take the stage, Rare are busy completing their next-generation titles for this new super-console.

I'd *kill* to get a brief interview with the Stampers now... :)

So things haven't changed that much since 1985 really...