The selection of Ultimate games included in the 2015 compilation Rare Replay almost completely lines up with their list of UK #1 hits. This is not surprising as something that would play into their decision-making. During one of the documentary videos included, Rare put up on screen the chart listing from the week their game Banjo-Kazooie reached #1, and talk about how much that achievement meant. They followed the charts. The result of the approach to including the big hits is that Rare Replay goes from Jetpac straight to Lunar Jetman and the celebrated games that followed it. That doesn’t tell the full story.

Rare Replay is not alone in that. A lot of histories of Ultimate are focused on the 18 months or so covering 1984 and a small period each side of it, in which they made many big swings and seemed to get everything right. Some give the impression that Ultimate arrived there fully formed. In the months between Jetpac and Lunar Jetman, they really weren’t yet that singular Ultimate, and they released no fewer than three other games during that time. In a later interview with Crash, Tim Stamper said that “we worked seven days a week, 8am till 1 or 2 in the morning” and said “I don’t feel it’s any good having engineers who only work 9 to 5 because you get a 9-to-5 game”. It’s a familiar attitude from its more recent destructive application at an industry-wide scale.

Like Jetpac, they gave all of those three games arcade-style gameplay. Also like Jetpac, they designed all of them to work on budget 16K Spectrums, as well as the better-selling 48K ones with three times as much memory. They didn’t quite manage to strike the same balance of simplicity and depth as Jetpac with any of them, but all are at least somewhat impressive in their own ways. Pssst is the closest to Jetpac in feel. It features a robot protecting a growing plant, and you have to swap in different pesticides, each with their own colour and design, to shoot different enemies with. That reached #10 on the charts. For Cookie they took things simpler. It has various ingredients bouncing around the screen like Jetpac’s enemies, with you trying to shoot the correct ones into a bowl at the bottom of the screen. It peaked at #18, the same fortnight, while Jetpac was #1.

  • Pssst (Ultimate, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Pssst (Ultimate, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Cookie (Ultimate, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Tranz Am (Ultimate, ZX Spectrum, 1983)
  • Tranz Am (Ultimate, ZX Spectrum, 1983)

Tranz Am was the most different and had the most chart success, briefly reaching #3 the following fortnight. It’s a top-down driving game set in a post-apocalyptic USA, as represented by a map that’s vaguely the right shape and fuel stations named after major cities. You need to roam around and collect trophies. There’s not very much to do and bouncing off invisible damage-dealing walls at the edges of the map sucks, but the driving is better, and it gets some way on the power of ambition. As of October 1983, though, Ultimate might uncharitably have been described as a company that had taken a scattergun approach and only landed on one really big hit. 

Their next move was entirely compatible with that characterisation: make a sequel to that hit. For Lunar Jetman they brought back the main character from Jetpac and his means of motion and shooting. The instructions place it in the aftermath of a crash landing, “after JETMAN’s poorly assembled multi-stage rocket started to disintegrate in warp space”. That was just Ultimate’s starting point. Lunar Jetman was the first time they made a game exclusively for 48K Spectrums, and with that extra memory they built a whole side-scrolling world. It has an alien base, teleporters and a bomb, plus a lunar rover which likely took inspiration from Irem’s 1982 arcade game Moon Patrol. They even managed to include a different font for Lunar Jetman’s text, a blobbily futuristic looking one rather than the Spectrum default.

With the added details came a different gameplay approach. You have to reach the alien base before they launch a missile to destroy your vehicle. You can move in the safety of the rover, but when you come to craters in the ground it can’t get by until you get out and stick platforms over them. At which point you are vulnerable to the onslaught of bouncing aliens. These really up the difficulty from Jetpac, the quickest ones coming in at such a fastball trajectory from the edge of the screen that you have very little time to react to them. And your jetpack now has a fuel limit like in their old arcade Enigma II. The result is that it’s best not to get drawn into flying around unless you absolutely have to, a Jetpac sequel in which the best strategy is to avoid playing Jetpac as far as you can.

Playing Lunar Jetman I miss the rhythm of the first game, and the many innovations don’t feel like they cohere enough to compensate. It is not going to be the last game from the end of 1983 to demonstrate that adding state-of-the-art complications onto an existing game can create something which has aged a lot worse. At the time, Lunar Jetman had a wow factor that easily outweighed other issues. Popular Computing Weekly hailed “the best graphics yet on the Spectrum”. “What can you say? Marvellous seems inadequate” said Crash, before going on to talk about how “solid, real and complicated” the alien base is, a detail which I barely gave a thought to. “The amount of things you can do with Jetman and the Hyperglide will keep you going for hours”. Lunar Jetman became Ultimate’s second #1. That still just made them a company with one particularly successful series, but that would change before 1983 even ended. 

Some other notes in Lunar Jetman‘s reviews hint towards an aspect of Ultimate’s future approach. The otherwise impressed PCW review criticised it for “lousy instructions – it took me half an hour to figure out what you’re supposed to do”. The game’s instructions, heavier on personality than most companies’, make clear how deliberate this was. After setting out Jetman’s mission and supporting equipment it ends “Pity he can’t find the operation manuals!”. R.E. in Home Computing Weekly took a more positive angle on the same thing. “Just so it’s not too easy, you are not told how to proceed or what each item does”. “This game, which is arcade with adventure elements grafted on, will take all but the best a long time to master”. There was something to be said for the strategy of deliberately withholding information.

MRIB individual formats games chart for fortnight ending 10 November 1983, Personal Computer News

Top of the charts for week ending 12 November 1983

UK games: Lunar Jetman (Ultimate Play the Game, ZX Spectrum)

UK films: Never Say Never Again

UK singles: Billy Joel – Uptown Girl

UK albums: Culture Club – Colour By Numbers

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