A Short History of Rare

1982 seems like a sort of holy nexus for the game industry; it's the year of EA, the year of Lucasfilm Games, and the year the Stamper brothers, then in their early twenties, who began to tackle the ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum was an odd system, a phenomenon in Europe (especially the UK) yet completely unheard of here. The best analogy I can come up with is that it served as a parallel for our Apple II – except even more mainstream. Therefore, where we got Sierra and Origin the Brits got the Stampers, buried under two levels of pseudonym ("Ashby Computer Graphics" for the company, "Ultimate: Play the Game" for the public brand).

A curious phenomenon of the Spectrum market is that whereas Apple software tended to stem from Dungeons & Dragons (through one path or another), the UK stuff tended to be based more in an arcade sensibility. The Stampers, coming themselves from an arcade background, were right at home with the hardware and the UK development scene. They digested the hardware, found exploits that made for interesting game concepts or visual approaches, and over three years proceeded to put out a nearly unbroken strain of mega-hit releases (by British standards) – fourteen, by the end of 1986. And that's not even counting their experiments with the Commodore.Over that period the Stampers worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, supposedly taking only two Christmas mornings away from their screens. Indicating a Lamborghini, in a famed late '80s interview, Tim Stamper explained "If you want that, you have to work to get it. I don't feel it's any good having engineers who only work nine to five, because you get a nine-to-five game. You need real input." The result of that hard work, and the ridiculous release schedule of original, well-designed software that came out of it, was something of a Beatles-scale fandom. Yet the Stampers' work schedule was such that they simply had no time for interviews or public appearances, adding to their mystique and – if anything – helping to make them the most in-demand development team in Britain. And then the Stampers did something nobody quite understood – they sold off their "Ultimate" brand, and dropped the Spectrum like an old shoe. Even when the Stampers laid it bare, years after the fact, still no one back home really understood what they were on about. The thing is, back around early 1984 the Stampers got ahold of Nintendo's new Famicom hardware, and were completely taken aback by it. They were convinced that, before long, it would become a sensation both in Japan and in the US, where Nintendo was planning to market it. In a burst of enthusiasm, they bought all the software available for it, and immediately set to reverse-engineering the system. They formed a secret subdivision of ACG called "Rare" to focus on Nintendo development, while Ultimate held up the public front, continuing its diligent Spectrum output.By early 1985 the Stampers had hacked out the Famicom and had begun to write software for it; they brought some of that work to Nintendo, as a proof of concept – the first Western developers to do so. Nintendo was sufficiently impressed to hand over the official documentation that the Stampers didn't even need at this point, and an official license to produce for the system – albeit under a unique "freelance" scheme. Whereas traditional publishers, under Nintendo of America's "quality assurance" standards, were only allowed a certain number of releases per year, Rare was allowed an unlimited budget, provided they could find a publisher. And indeed, by the late '80s Rare – by now the official company name, as it was in the Nintendo business for good – was publishing more games per year than anyone in his right mind would suggest: from six to fifteen to seventeen separate releases. The curious issue here is that, whereas the Spectrum was a smash only in the Stampers' corner of the world, that corner is also one of the few places left largely unaffected by the Nintendomania.