After a gap of a decade, here is the payoff to one of the earliest side stories of Super Chart Island. Leading Spectrum developers Ultimate Play the Game have gone international! In writing about Ultimate’s 1984 Underwurlde back in entry #5, I said:
There’s an irony to the fact that Ultimate/Rare stuck around as a British success story in part because, unlike others, they predicted that UK home computers would prove a dead end. So they made a decision to pursue global reach by throwing themselves in with a Japanese company called Nintendo.
By 1995, the dead end was visible to everyone. Ultimate Soccer Manager was the final Amiga game Super Chart Island will cover, and more broadly the last on the kind of specific-format home computer that has made up most of the journey of the UK’s most popular games so far. That left the PC, with its infinite specification complications and what was already a dwindling presence for the kind of games we are mostly looking at, or the world of video game consoles. Consoles were the place to be, especially given the easier access to the bigger markets of Japan and America, and that included Nintendo’s even if they were looking third best behind Sega and now Sony in the UK.
The Stamper brothers, the leading people behind Ultimate, set up a new company called Rare in the mid-’80s for projects outside of the home computer market. They worked their way up from backwards engineering Nintendo’s NES to Rare now being part-owned by Nintendo, and that meant not only making games for Nintendo but being allowed to use some of their characters. The result was the Donkey Kong Country series, which was a massive success in those bigger markets and finally in the UK as well.
From a Super Chart Island perspective, the remarkable thing about playing the beloved international hit Donkey Kong Country 2 is not just that it’s made by the same people who made Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore. It’s that it’s so very obviously made by the same people who made Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore.
The secret to Knight Lore’s success was coming up with clever new graphical techniques which enabled Ultimate to create a platformer in three dimensions in a way beyond what anyone else had managed for home computers. The secret to Donkey Kong Country’s success was… coming up with clever new graphical techniques which enabled Rare to create a platformer in three dimensions in a way beyond what anyone else had managed for 16-bit consoles. Unlike Knight Lore, Donkey Kong Country’s gameplay uses a mere two dimensions, but it’s the 3D looking animations of all of its characters which stand out. The graphics of Diddy’s Kong Quest stand up well even now, matching cartoon aesthetics to a high level of detail, and the illusion of an extra dimension, in a way which outdoes even contemporaries from more powerful machines.
When it comes to the kind of platformer that they made with those graphics, the flavour of Ultimate is even more apparent. Diddy Kong and Dixie Kong, the two characters you get to control in turn or together, do not move with anything like the agility of Mario. The game’s animal theme and fondness for impressive-looking setpieces with barrel-cannons and the like, not to mention its dual leads, runs closer to Sonic, but this is a Sonic in treacle. Diddy and Dixie don’t go fast. Their handling is bulky, the better to give a chance to admire the animations. How Rare compensate for this is by essentially the same thing that propelled Sabre Wulf: a constant stream of new things happening.
Just as Sabreman had a range of unpredictable orchids to collect, Diddy and Dixie have bananas, letters, and tokens, each building towards extra lives or opportunities for them. On top of that they often have each other to collect. Get hit and the one you were controlling drops out, leaving you with just the other; find a barrel labelled DK and you get the insurance of a companion back again. This means enforced switching between the faster Diddy and Dixie’s Peach-style floating jump, needing to master both and recognise how to use them in a situation, and is a highly effective advance on Sonic’s survival-via-rings mechanic.
Even as you are doing similar bulky jumps again and again, you are both taking in the imaginative and beautiful locales of the game and managing at a different level the task of looking for the next in each range of collectibles, or reacting to who you have available to control at that moment. Diddy’s Kong Quest is flashy and new and completely rooted in ideas that were established a decade earlier. Here is the same joy that helped make the ZX Spectrum so big for the UK, taken to the world stage.
