Ultimate - Play The Game

The Ultimate Story

Back in the mists of time, when the 16k Spectrum was still in it's infancy, a typical Software House meeting would go something like this:
"Hey! I've just designed a great new game! It's called Worm! You play a worm!"
"That sounds great kid! It's not similiar to Snake by any chance, is it?"
"No! It's completely different! This time you're a worm!"
"Brilliant! We'll sell it for Ł5.95 a copy!"
Or maybe something like this:
"Hey! I've just designed a great new game! It's called Frogger! You have to dodge cars and things and make it to the other side of the road!"
"Frogger? Already been done, mate."
"Did I say Frogger? I meant to say, erm, Goat Traffic!"
"Brilliant! We'll sell it for Ł5.95 a copy!"

Luckily for us, it wasn't long before Ultimate came along and, at least THREE times, changed the face of computer programming as we know it.
Very little is known about the people behind Ultimate. They were possibly the most secretive and mysterious Software House ever. They never gave interviews at the time, they never went in for all that silly promotional stuff, all that posing for photographs to sell games (step forward Code Masters, you utter, utter twats). They would never give the computer press preview shots of their forthcoming games. They wouldn't even put any screenshots on the adverts or even the game packaging itself! Great jumping gobstoppers, they wouldn't even include proper instructions in the bloody game!!!
Chances are, when you went out and bought an Ultimate game from Micro Fun, you would have no idea of what the game would look like. You would bring it home and open up the instructions and be greeted with something like:

"O Holy Lanterns, burning deep into the souls of long-dead rotting skeletons!
Take hold of thy staff and delve swifty into the chasm of the undead before midnight approacheth and buries our souls and minds forever in the infinite pit of hell!"

This would often come as a bit of a shock to the novice player who just wanted to know which keys you pressed to make him go left and right. But the more experienced player would know that none of this mattered because it was an Ultimate game and this meant it was going to be brilliant.

The first batch of Ultimate games appeared in 1983 and were
all for the 16k Spectrum. These first releases developed the
Ultimate 'look and feel' which would be replicated in every
single game they ever released - the simple but broodily
effective title menus, the atmospheric plinky-plonky intro
tunes and the unique squelchy sound effects would instantly
let you know that you were playing an Ultimate game and
gave a nice bit of uniformity to the entire range.
Jetpac was probably the most famous of these first tentative
releases. You had to control a little Jetman and gather fuel
for his rocket whilst shooting the nasty aliens. The aliens
changed from level to level and this is what made is so
maddeningly addictive, the desire to get to the next level and
see what the next lot of aliens looked like. Even the Jetman's rocket changed every five or so levels to a more sophisticated upgraded model. So whilst Space Invaders was still boring us all in the seaside resorts with it's endless monotony of levels that were exactly the same, Ultimate were cramming in all these desirable new features and extra gameplay in just 16k of tiny Spectrum memory.
I mentioned earlier on in the guide that Deathchase was the best 16k game ever, and whilst this is true, it has to be said that just about all of the other 16k classics were made by Ultimate. Another early favourite of mine was Cookie - you played a cute little Chef who had to shoot all the right ingredients into the cooking bowl at the bottom of the screen whilst trying to keep out the bad ingredients and shooting nasty things all at the same time. It was fast, it was frenetic, it was fiendish. Again, the nasties changed from level to level and again this spurred on the desire to get to to the next stage and see the new nasties.
Even during these very first releases, Ultimate were already making a name for themselves by creating the most wonderfully designed, simple to play and yet stupidly addictive games ever seen on a Spectrum. Critics often wondered aloud in the pages of the computer press what Ultimate would be capable of if they ever turned their attention to the juicy new 48k Spectrum with all that extra memory. So they went and told us. They released Atic Atac.

Atic Atac And All That

Oooooooh, Atic Atac was marvellous. It was the very first arcade adventure EVER in the sense that this was the first game where you had to pick up certain objects and then take them to certain other rooms for certain events to happen. Of course, we'd all done that in those crappy text adventure games that nobody really liked, but this was the first time that this 'adventure' element had been introduced into a fast-paced arcade game where shooting the nasties was equally as important as carrying a crucifix when approaching the vampire.
The game was set in a weird haunted house and your
objective was to collect all four pieces of the key so you
could make your escape. The design behind the game was
brilliantly inventive, especially considering that Atic Atac
was the pioneer of all future arcade adventures. Some of the
doors in the house had their own colour and could only be
accessed if you were carrying the equivelent coloured key.
Some rooms contained demonic creatures from the pits of
hell that could only be overcome if you were carrying the
right object. Bloody hell, you could even choose to control
one of FOUR different characters, each of which could
move about the house in a different way to the others by
having exclusive access to the larders or the armouries.
The house was HUGE, the gameplay was tremendously
paced and hard on the trigger button on your joystick and the puzzles were tricky and well-thought out. It's amazing to think that years after this was released, inferior software houses were still releasing much more simplistic and basic arcade adventures that didn't have a shred of Atic Atac's sophistication and prowess. I've just played it myself ten minutes ago and it's still fantastic and it still pisses all over games that were made seven years later. Atic Atac is wonderful.

Fast forward about six months and Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, the first game to feature Sabre Man as the hero, a character who would go on to gain legendary status in the Spectrum world, as he would star in many other ground-breaking Ultimate games and become their best-known figure. A quick look around some of the retrogaming websites will tell you that Sabre Wulf was apparently the best thing since sliced bread and is perhaps the best game ever made. (A well-known Spectrum magazine at the time, CRASH, even refused to give it an overall rating as the game was so good it 'defied' rating!).
Well.......I'm still struggling to see why, to be honest. Don't get me wrong, Sabre Wulf is a great little game but at the end of the day it's just Atic Atac set in the jungle, minus some of the atmosphere. Perhaps one of the reasons why Sabre Wulf seems to be so popular is that it gained a wider audience. Whereas Atic Atac was only ever released for the Spectrum, Sabre Wulf was also released for the Commodore 64 and so more people were going to end up playing it. A C64 owner would possibly tell you that Sabre Wulf was the first arcade adventure ever, but that's their loss - that honour goes to Atic Atac and it's maybe a shame that more people didn't get to play it - it's better than Sabre Man's first outing.

And whilst we're on the subject of slagging things off - let's briefly turn
our attention to another game released round about this time, Lunar
Jetman, the long-awaited sequel to the now classic Jetpac. Try as I
might, I could never get to grips with this game as a kid. The main
problem seemed to be that it was impossible to stay alive for more than
about three seconds. You still played the same Jetman, this time hopping
around a much larger alien landscape, shooting aliens and sometimes
being able to get into your moonbuggy until it came across a crater in
the landscape and then you'd have to get out again. The ultimate aim of
the game was to destroy alien bases but nobody sane ever got that far
because of the relentless onslaught of aliens which came hurtling right at you and stopped you from doing anything productive,like finding out how the game was supposed to be played. (Again, the instructions weren't very helpful and this one time, you probably really did need them, cos nobody had a clue what the fuck was going on.) The loading screen featured the moonbuggy pulling a trailer along the lunar landscape. Somebody then sent in some tips for the game to a computer magazine, with a photograph depicting the Jetman and the trailer and details of how to find it in the game. Ultimate fans spent months, maybe even years trying to find this trailer. There was no trailer, it was all another hoax. BASTARDS.

Knight Lore And The Golden Years

None of that matters though because Ultimate were about to release one of the most influential games ever made. When Sabre Man made his return to the gaming scene in Knight Lore, released in 1985, people's jaws were dropping in sheer amazement at what their tiny Spectrums could do. For the first time ever, we could now control a character in a pant-wettingly exciting 3-D environment and we were even able to manipulate objects within that environment,push them around each screen, stand on them to be able to reach things.....it was awe-inspiring at the time to see magical stuff like this on the Spectrum. Ultimate had gone and created the 'Isometric 3-D Game' and once again, they had packed it with unrivalled levels of sophistication which would embarass software houses in years to come who still couldn't come close to emulating it properly.
The scenario is another confusing poem about spells and
wizards and the undead, but the general idea behind the game
seems to be that poor old Sabre Man has got himself into a
spot of bother and has had a curse put upon him which,
rather inconveniently, turns him into a werewolf every time
the clock strikes midnight. You must guide Sabre Man
through a spooky castle, avoiding the tricks and traps and
ghouls and nasties, and then, er, do something with some
objects, and erm......oh hang on, I think there's a wizard in
there somewhere, you need to give things to him, I think......
ok then, I can't remember a lot of the exact details. I've just
been playing it again recently and can't get nearly as far as I
could when I was a kid. That's old age and senility for you.
But again, that's the beauty of Ultimate games, you have to work out what to do for yourself, they don't just give you the instructions on a plate, and the games were so utterly enchanting that it was easy to get completely carried away and reach orgasmic levels of excitement when things suddenly start to click into place.
The best feature of all about Knight Lore was the slightly disturbing way that Sabre Man painfully transformed into a werewolf every few minutes, normally when you were just about to perform a very accurately timed jump and it would bugger things up for you. Another interesting feature was the way that certain rooms behaved differently depending on whether you were Sabre Man or the werewolf at the time....some baddies would be hostile to Sabre Man but be a bit scared of you if you were the werewolf etc etc.
But the most amazing thing about this revolutionary game which changed the face of gaming forever and ever is the fact that Ultimate actually finished writing the game before Sabre Wulf was completed and decided to sit on it for a while because the world wasn't ready for it! I can see you've fallen off your chair at that, haven't you? Can you imagine a software house doing that these days? Writing a world-changing computer game and then sitting on it for about six months? Admittedly, this also highlights how shrewd Ultimate were. Sabre Wulf would happily sit at the top of the computer game charts for several months, and releasing Knight Lore early would understandably have harmed it's sales because it was infinitely more advanced. But I still find that to be the most amazing fact ever - Knight Lore was completed before Sabre Wulf. Go and tell your friends, share this knowledge.

Round about this time, Ultimate could do no wrong and were
considered by every sane 8-bit computer game fan to be the
Gods of the computer game scene. They were still shrouding
themselves in mystery, they still refused to participate with the
computer press, all they did was release brilliant game after
brilliant game. For ages and ages.
Alien 8 was another great isometric 3-D game, this time with a
science fiction feel and a much smoother and polished look.
Sabre Man would continue to star in classic mould-breaking
games such as Underwurlde and Pentagram. His final
appearance would be in the gorgeously atmospheric
Nightshade which pushed the isometric 3-D game just about
as far as it could possibly go. (Well, until a good few years later
when Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond would create Head
Over Heels - but anyway.......) If you actually managed
to complete Nightshade, you would be rewarded with an
advertisement for the next Sabre Man game - Mire Mare.
Sadly, no such game ever materialised. Ultimate were about to
sail right down the toilet and the world was about to lose the
best software house ever.

The End Of The Line

Ultimate did briefly turn their attention to the Commodore 64 and the way they did it was yet another indication of how brilliant they were. 99% of software houses would create one game on one sytem and then convert it to the other systems. Ultimate preferred to release unique titles on each system which would get the best out of each computer, and so C64 fans were treated to their own special line of Ultimate games including some real classics such
as Entombed and Blackwyche. Disappointingly
though, they didn't have quite the same impact as
they had done on the Speccy scene, and sales
weren't great.
Eventually, the Ultimate saga ended not with a
bang, not even with a whimper, but with a
sweaty wet fart. The mysterious programmers
who had created this long line of classic games
eventually jumped ship, and the Ultimate 'name'
was sold to software giant U.S Gold who made a
couple of piss-poor attempts at emulating the
Ultimate 'look and feel', failed miserably and the
Ultimate name disappeared forever. Hardcore Ultimate fans like me don't even count these last few titles as proper Ultimate games and thankfully they are omitted from most compilations and collections.
For those of you wanting to play these classic games on Realspec, the work is slightly harder for you as Ultimate are one of the very few software houses to refuse distribution of their old games on the internet, so you won't find any of them on some of the more official goody-goody sites. However, a quick look at some of the naughty foreign websites (no, not those kind) should help you get what you're looking for. I eventually managed to get every single Ultimate game ever released on every system after a few days of hunting on Google. Did I tell you my e-mail address? It's Dannytriangle@aol.com. Just thought I'd let you know that.

Right, now that we've taken an in-depth look at the best of the speccy stuff, let's have a goosey-gander at some of the other great things that happened after the ZX Spectrum....

Rough Guide To Home Computing & The Arcades
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