Monday February 8th

My mother has found a job. She collects money from Space Invader machines. She started today in response to an urgent phone call from the job agency that she is registered with. She said that the fullest machines are those in unrespectable cafes and university common rooms. I think my mother is betraying her principles. She is pandering to an obsession of weak minds.

Those are the words of fictional pretentious teenager and Ashby-de-la-Zouch resident Adrian Mole, in Sue Townsend’s 1982 bestseller The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾. Meanwhile two brothers in real life Ashby-de-la-Zouch, barely out of their teens themselves, had been making a living out of that obsession. Chris Stamper and Tim Stamper started out at Associated Leisure, a company importing arcade machines to the UK. They helped produce arcade conversion kits, an approach for keeping up-to-date without having to buy entire new machines. When the students in that common room got tired of Space Invaders, someone with a kit could take that Space Invaders cabinet, give it a new board and a new paint job, and turn it into Galaxian.  

With ambitions beyond that, the Stampers joined with colleague John Lathbury and went into making their own arcade games. They set up as Ashby Computers and Graphics — ACG — in offices above the newsagent their dad ran in the small Leicestershire town. A couple of their earlier games were different varieties of space shooter. 1980’s Vortex is based on Asteroids, and ran on modified Space Invaders hardware. In 1981’s Enigma II you shoot at alien ships up-screen in a familiar way, and you can also hold down thrusters to move up towards them. Occasionally a branded space shuttle flies across the screen. For some ACG games they went on to take up other themes, like Dingo, where you dodge wildlife while running around among brightly coloured flowers.

  • Vortex (ACG/Zilec, Arcade, 1980)
  • Enigma II (ACG/Zilec, Arcade, 1981)
  • Enigma II (ACG/Zilec, Arcade, 1981)
  • Dingo (ACG/Jaleco, Arcade, 1983)

Through those games they got used to working with the Z80 chip, the ZX Spectrum was also based on. As the Spectrum took its place as the UK’s leading microcomputer, the Stampers saw an opportunity. Not for the last time, they pivoted to a new machine and a new name. Carole Ward joined Stamper, Stamper and Lathbury, and the four started making Spectrum games under the name Ultimate Play the Game. The four of them also started giving interviews to computer magazines, to which they brought an irresistible matter-of-fact arrogance consistent with calling themselves Ultimate.

They described themselves Britain’s most experienced arcade game design team, alluding to mysterious experience in developing games for big name companies, which still can’t all be verified today. When it came to the Spectrum, John Lathbury explained, “we looked at the competition at the end of last year and, to be honest, we didn’t think much of the standard of software being sold”. Tim Stamper predicted that Ultimate’s turnover would be into the millions within a year, and further that there would be “a filtering-out of the companies not up to scratch”.

Their first release, tasked with living up to all of that, was Jetpac. You play as an astronaut “delivering spaceship kits to various planets in the solar system throughout the Galaxy” and looking to “make yourself the richest person in the whole Universe” along the way. You collect rocket parts and portions of fuel, one at a time, and drop them off to assemble them into a finished ship. You have a jetpack which can lift you up-screen, Enigma II style, a few platforms to stand on, and a horizontal laser to deal with the masses of enemies flying about. 

Jetpac was not a game which expanded the scale of what an arcade-style game could be, like Donkey Kong was. Its proceedings are confined to one screen, which wraps around so if you leave to the right you reappear on the left, and vice versa. The platforms never move or change. You assemble and fuel your rocket in the same place, over and over, although if you get far enough the visual design of that rocket changes. Instead of an expansion, Jetpac is a considered and polished take on how much could still be done with one screen. 

Every review I can find from the time commented on how good the graphics are, and the rocket and astronaut look impressive against contemporaries. They move with an enjoyable smoothness, too. More than that, though, Jetpac packs a lot into its small form. There is a fair bit of Asteroids in its free movement around 2D space, but confining your shots to horizontal makes for a different challenge. The platforms offer you some protection while also restricting your movement, both because you walk along them and because there isn’t a whole lot of screen room left above them. The collectibles you need appearing in different places means you have to work out how to use the full playfield to your advantage.

The setup also lends itself to a lot of variety with only small tweaks to the enemies you face. In a level where the enemies are concentrated at the top of the screen, they tend to stay there because of the platforms. So you have a lot of quite safe space to work with, but to collect objects you need to make raids into dangerous territory. On levels where they’re more at the bottom, the danger spikes are when one gets through to the space above the platforms – rarer, but more out of your control. Each level feels like a new challenge even as most elements remain constant. 

Jetpac’s smart approach and slick execution helped it to a six week run at the top of the UK charts in summer 1983, and a couple of returns there afterwards. As Ultimate’s first game and first big success, Jetpac has a particular legacy. Ultimate’s successors Rare released a modern reimagining in 2007, Jetpac Refuelled. An early XBox Live Arcade game, it added some complications to the weaponry, but at its heart retained the same gameplay, which still worked. The company later included both Jetpac and Jetpac Refuelled in 2015’s Rare Replay, a 30-game compilation of their history from the beginning of Ultimate onward. It ejected ACG’s earlier arcade games from the canon.

  • Jetpac Refuelled (Rare, Xbox 360, 2007)
  • Rare Replay (Rare, Xbox One, 2015)

The collectible achievements in Rare Replay include, for most of its games, an achievement given the first time you play that game (the exceptions are all among Rare’s later releases). It is therefore possible to use global achievements stats to track the international proportion of players to have tried each game. The most popular, which a full third of players have loaded, is Conker’s Bad Fur Day (a game which failed to reach the UK top 40 on release in 2001). That’s followed by Battletoads and Killer Instinct Gold. Fourth on the list, albeit clearly boosted by being the first game to come up, is ancient Jetpac. I went through and completed the whole set of special challenges for it in Rare Replay, and had a blast.

  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 23 July 1983, Personal Computer News
  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 06 August 1983, Personal Computer News
  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 20 August 1983, Personal Computer News
  • MRIB individual formats chart for fortnight ending 15 October1983, Personal Computer News
  • PCS individual formats chart for fortnight ending 06 November 1983, Home Computing Weekly

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