Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
Because of all the busyness yesterday, I didn't have a chance to mark a neat anniversary - 40 years since Rare's (then Ultimate) first game: JetPac.
Netting a cool £1 million with 300,000 sales, a LOT by 1983 standards, it provided the Stamper Bros, Tim and Chris, the financial security to develop a handful of other beloved Speccy games and turn their eye to Japan and study development practices and the Famicom, including reverse engineering it, something that Nintendo had declared as impossible. Turning up with that feat and some tech demos, the Stampers so impressed Nintendo that they awarded the nascent Rare, established by Ultimate to develop games for the Famicom and NES, the unprecidented honour of support and an unlimited budget from them.
But yeah, good ol' Jetpac - what a fantastic start. Synonymous with the #ZXSpectrum, it remains a 16k wonder, one of my favourite single-screen arcade games.
@SharkaBytes It's impossible to assess this game objectively as the nostalgia is overpowering. But I will say that there are only a tiny handful of games from that era that I can still honestly claim to play regularly today. "Jetpac" is one.
@sourdust I was on the C64 side of the fence back in the day and only played JetPac for the first time a couple of years ago, so have no nostalgia to battle against. And it's one I play regularly too, it's such a perfect bite of arcade action and really impressive for the year and being only 16k.
@SharkaBytes I only recently got to play the #VIC20 version (on real hardware, at least) and it's really, objectively, every bit as good as on the Speccie. And that is running in 8k!