The Ultimate-Rare story: 40 years of brilliant British games, from Jetpac and GoldenEye to Sea of Thieves

Forty years since the release of its first game, British developer Rare - formerly known as Ultimate - has cemented its place in gaming history. We look back at its origins on the ZX Spectrum and NES

For five long years, the ZX Spectrum magazine Crash tried to get an interview with the people behind Ultimate Play the Game, which had become one of the UK's premier games developers. They heard nothing until, one day early in 1988, Crash got a phone call. It was them. And they wanted to talk.

Ultimate Play the Game, a trading name of Ashby Computers and Graphics, began in 1982, owned by one family: the Stampers - brothers Chris and Tim, and Tim's future wife Carole Ward, alongside programmer John Lathbury. Even at this stage, the Stampers were supremely confident in their own abilities, honed during the development of several arcade games. We chose [this] company's name because we felt it was representative of our products: the ultimate games," Tim Stamper declared in an August issue of Home Computing Weekly. The brothers designed and created games while Carole juggled administrative roles and contributed art to several of its first hits. Those early titles included Jetpac, the home computer game that thrust the company into the big time, and turns 40 years old this year.