1983 was a good year for Ultimate. They released their first game Jetpac to much success earlier in the year. Then (after some other, less successful 16K games) they finished the year with a one-two punch: the more advanced follow-up, Lunar Jetman, and the bold new adventure of Atic Atac. After how well that went, they decided to take the same approach to 1984.

If you believe later interviews from the frequently self-mythologising Ultimate, they committed to that plan to the extent of holding one of their games back for half a year. Earlier in 1984 they released Sabre Wulf. Then at the end of 1984, another one-two punch. The bold new step, the one held back, was Knight Lore, which I will be covering in a different post (though not one on Knight Lore itself). The more direct follow-up to Sabre Wulf was the same one announced at Sabre Wulf’s end. “The next adventures of Sabre Man will be continued in the Underwurlde”.

As ever with Ultimate, it’s difficult to find many specifics on the development of Underwurlde, including on who worked on it beyond the Stamper brothers and their usual core team. Invited to give a comment on Underwurlde for Bitmap Books’ Spectrum compendium in 2015, the Stamper brothers instead talked in general terms about why the Spectrum was a perfect computer for the time. “Due to its limited hardware capabilities, you also had to be really inventive to get the best out of it. Nothing breeds ingenuity like restriction, and this ingenuity spawned a whole industry of very clever young people”.

Ultimate’s own ingenuity was working for them and they were clearly growing as a company, with Louise Stamper now handling some press including a comment for Personal Computer Games upon Underwurlde hitting #1 in their charts. She also collected at least one of Ultimate’s several Golden Joystick awards at Computer & Video Games magazine’s ceremony the following year. Anything more concrete on Ultimate’s increased size comes from a few years later, though. They largely wanted to let the games speak for themselves, and it was working for them.

In some ways, Underwurlde is the closing game in a trilogy of maze games with big maps that started in Atic Atac. At the top of its map, when not in the caverns of the Underwurlde, you’re in a house with bookshelves and torches and cabinets that could have come straight from Atic Atac. Ultimate gave the player the same need to find a handful of special items as in Sabre Wulf, and to use them to take out specific enemies in the same way as Atic Atac with its spanner-defeated Frankenstein’s monster. You are also beset by a constantly replenishing series of minor nasties (harpies, gargoyles and beaucoup jellyfish) in much the same way as the previous games.

For Underwurlde, though, Ultimate changed the fundamental viewpoint, using the other traditional 2D view before finding their way through to a third dimension for Knight Lore. Underwurlde is a side-on game, working on flip-screen platformer mechanics. Sabreman may have returned but his sabre is gone, replaced initially by a bubble gun thing, and he has gained the ability to leap like an ungainly cartoon frog and get buffeted about like a crash test dummy. He also gets a rope to swing on. Coming within a year of Jet Set Willy and home versions of Hunchback there are some obvious potential inspirations to trace, although the animation and action of the way Sabreman dangles on the rope and lowers himself into the depths is more developed than either.

  • Hunchback (Ocean, 1983/1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Jet Set Willy (Software Projects, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • Underwurlde (Ultimate, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

Underwurlde is big, hundreds of screens big, and makes drawing a map even more of an essential than its predecessors. It has three different goals, big ‘guardian’ enemies that stand in place and you need the correct weapon to defeat and remove. It also has a slightly different take again on combat. The shooting is closer to Atic Atac but your relationship to enemies is quite different. Instead of sapping your energy, they do no damage but knock you back, with a long fall the only deadly thing in the game. This makes them both more and less of a concern, depending on your context. When you’re climbing vertical passages by standing on improbably secure bubbles of volcanic gas, it makes them a major issue and often a frustration.

Some of the people who made Underwurlde would go on to make very different kinds of platformers, to a lot more global recognition. Large, exploration-based platformers more in its vein would soon be a thriving genre, too, though other people would have to work out how to take some rough edges away first. More than any of Ultimate’s other games except Lunar Jetman, I find Underwurlde a struggle to enjoy when coming to it as someone who didn’t play it at the time. Mind you, I had a pretty similar experience when I first played Nintendo’s Metroid (1986) in 2007.

  • Metroid (Nintendo, 1986, Famicom)
  • Underwurlde (Ultimate, 1984, ZX Spectrum)

In Kate Willaert’s excellent video Samus Aran Origins: Metroid’s Influences Beyond Alien, she identifies numerous influences on Metroid’s concepts and visual style, making a convincing case for the influence of the anime Space Cobra. She also mentions some gameplay precedents, and points out that Underwurlde arrived two years sooner at the crucial mechanic of collecting new weapons and using them as keys to locked doors. She adds the fact that Ultimate, the soon-to-be Rare, had made contact with Nintendo around this time, increasing the feasibility of the idea that Metroid’s developers might have played Underwurlde. Finally, Willaert mentions a great quote given to Retro Gamer by sometime Rare contractors Ste and John Pickford. They said that one of the Stampers had referred to Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda as “Miyamoto’s rip-off of Sabre Wulf”.

  • Sabre Wulf (Ultimate, 1984, ZX Spectrum)
  • The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986, Famicom)

The loose similarity between Underwurlde and Metroid is one that has occasionally been noted by others too. Its vertical cave passages feel in the same spirit, if very different in practice. I was amused to find one forum comment on Super Metroid which read “I’m annoyed that Super Metroid strayed so far from the Underwurlde template”. Imagine the entire genre of expansive exploration platformers not being called Metroidvanias but instead being named after Underwurlde. Or at least named after a portmanteau originally coined for another popular game series taking a new Underwurlde direction (perhaps a world where Spellbound Dizzy’s many mineshaft puzzles took off and led to everyone talking about Underwurldizzys).

Among the many timeline changes needed for anything like that to have happened, there would probably have needed to be a Super Underwurlde that refined and built on Underwurlde‘s ideas. There wasn’t. Even one of the future games set up by Underwurlde’s multiple endings, Mire Mare, was never released. Ultimate’s immediate and ultimate futures both lay in a different direction. Whether or not Underwurlde influenced games with legacies that reached more people around the world, though, makes no difference to its status in 1984. And that, in the UK, was as a game that a lot of people were excited about and loved.

“Well worth the wait” and “buy it, of course!” said Computer & Video Games. “More worthy of the 10 quid price tag than was Sabre Wulf” said Crash, before using Underwurlde’s existence as an argument against piracy. SW in Micro Adventurer went with “definitely gets my vote for fast action, entertainment and superb graphics”. R.B. in The Big K got a bit meta and set out his dilemma as a reviewer of Ultimate games: “He also knows that, by the time his review sees print, ten billion smart-ass whizz-brats will have cracked the game and sent in highly detailed maps of the whole play area, complete with strategies”. Underwurlde was no exception.

ASP individual formats (non- arcade) for week ending 01 December 1984, Home Computing Weekly

Top of the charts for week ending 01 December 1984

UK games (non-arcade): Underwurlde (Ultimate, ZX Spectrum)

UK films: Give My Regards to Broad Street

UK singles: Frankie Goes to Hollywood – The Power of Love

UK albums: Various Artists – The Hits Album

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