The Ultimate-Rare story: 40 years of brilliant British games
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 !
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.
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]!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
Atic Atac 2 when