In what would be an otherwise perfectly straightforward Ports of Entry list, where every single other game by Rare was unambiguously developed for one platform, Battletoads / Double Dragon is the one aberration. If I hadn't played its various versions, I'd assume NES-centric development based on the release date, the reuse of NES sprites from previous games (with unimpressive 16-bit upgrades to their respective versions), and a plethora of 8-bit technical wizardry, including pseudo-3D scrolling effects, which are mundane on 16-bit consoles. On top of that, the NES version also features faster, more fluid gameplay than the SNES, better hit detection, and it looks more colorful (the later Genesis version is more similar to NES than SNES in these regards).
But there are some inconsistencies. For one, the music sounds correct on SNES, and nowhere else. The SNES version also feels incomplete compared to other versions - it has less dialog between-levels, is almost completely missing the intro cut-scene, and the soundtrack has fewer songs (even if it is overall much higher quality). These things make it feel like the NES version had more development time, even if it came out earlier.
My best theory is that NES was the base platform, but SNES conversion started off an early and incomplete NES build without music or its final cutscenes. And that Wise composed the SNES soundtrack first before converting to NES. Further developments on NES did not work their way back into the SNES port, but the later Genesis port used NES as a base.
Select chronology:
Ultimate Play the Game era
Title
Lead platform
Date
Contemporary ports
Dingo
Arcade
1983
Jetpac
ZX Spectrum
1983-5
1984 ports to BBC Micro & VIC-20
Lunar Jetman
ZX Spectrum
1983-11
Atic Atac
ZX Spectrum
1983-12
Sabre Wulf
ZX Spectrum
1984-5
Same-year port to BBC Micro 1985 ports to Amstrad CPC & C64
Knight Lore
ZX Spectrum
1984-12
1985 ports to Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, & MSX
Alien 8
ZX Spectrum
1985-2
Same-year ports to Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, & MSX
NES era
Title
Lead platform
Date
Contemporary ports
Wizards & Warriors
NES
1987-12
R.C. Pro-Am
NES
1988-2
Same-year port to PlayChoice-10 arcade system
WWF Wrestlemania
NES
1989-2
Cobra Triangle
NES
1989-7
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
NES
1989-9
The Amazing Spider-Man
Game Boy
1990-7
Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warpship
NES
1990-9
1991 port to PlayChoice-10 arcade system
A Nightmare on Elm Street
NES
1990-10
Captain Skyhawk
NES
1990
Same-year port to PlayChoice-10 arcade system
Snake Rattle N Roll
NES
1990
Battletoads
NES
1991-6
Super R.C. Pro-Am
Game Boy
1991-10
Battletoads
Game Boy
1991-11
SNES era
Title
Lead platform
Date
Contemporary ports
Battletoads / Double Dragon
???
1993-6
Same-year releases on NES, SNES, & Gameboy 1994 release on Genesis
Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
SNES
1993-6
Killer Instinct
Arcade
1994-10
1995 ports to Gameboy & SNES
Donkey Kong Country
SNES
11/1/1994
Donkey Kong Land
Game Boy
1995-6
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
SNES
11/21/1995
Killer Instinct 2
Arcade
1996-1
Donkey Kong Land 2
Game Boy
1996-9
Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!
At the peak of their heyday and for many years after, Rare was perhaps the most internationally celebrated British game
developer of all time, thanks in no small part to their lucrative,
multi-generational partnership with Nintendo.
Officially, Rare would have you believe that their history begins
with Jetpac, a 1983 release by their founders Chris & Tim Stamper
for the ZX Spectrum microcomputer. This is the earliest game in the Rare
Replay collection of 2015,
it's included in Donkey Kong 64's minigames, and even
their collected
works compilation of 1988 begins with Jetpac. Jetpac is indeed the
next whale on the list, but any reading on the subject of their history
beyond Rare's own curation shows that it goes back further than that,
though things do get rather murky.
Wikipedia's page on Ultimate Play the Game states, citing a 1983
computer magazine, that they claimed to be "the most experienced arcade
video game design team in Britain," but there are no contemporary lists
of their prior arcade game credits, and what's available lacks veracity.
The article on the Stamper brothers mentions "12 arcade games" but cagily states that most
of them were kept secret and sold to major developers. One of the few
listed there is Gyruss, which I find preposterous.
Digital Antiquarian
writes that in 1979 they began their careers at Associated Leisure,
developing arcade conversion kits for the British market. Their manager,
Norman Parker, convinced them and their friend/co-worker John Lathbury
to join his startup Zilec, which developed games in-house.
The earliest Zilec game emulated by MAME is Vortex, and according to a thread on Spectrum Computing Forums,
the names of John Lathbury and Chris Stamper appear in the ROM code.
Vortex is a crummy Asteroids knock-off with choppy gameplay, lackluster
graphics, and strange controls that require you to hold the fire button
to thrust.
The next, 1981's Enigma II, is a vertical shooter that lift
ideas from a number of other, better contemporaries, most notably
mimicking the look of Phoenix, though it's not without some original
ideas, like having limited vertical control via fuel-burning thrusters.
The Stampers' earliest sourced credit is 1982's The Pit, though
not as its original designers. Electronics shopkeeper and tinkerer Andy
Walker had custom-built a multi-game system which was demoed at trade
shows in London and Miami. The Pit proved its most popular title, but
Walker's system just wasn't suited for mass production, and needed
conversion.
The historical record gets muddy here. The Golden Age Arcade Historian
writes that Walker licensed the game to Centuri and Zilec and suggests
diverging versions; that Centuri rewrote the game to run on their own
boards, while Zilec had the Stampers port it to Galaxian-derived
hardware for English arcades. An interview with Walker published in
Retro Gamer seems to be the source for this. However, MAME shows no
significant differences between the Zilec and Centuri versions, nor
gives any indication that they run on different hardware. A third
version, licensed to Taito for Japanese distribution, likewise appears
identical.
For what it's worth, it's very easy for me to believe that The Pit
uses Galaxian-derived hardware, as it uses Z80 processors, the same
background resolution, and similar tilemap graphics. Centuri's in-house
games of the time, on the other hand, used M6502 processors and had
256x256 bitmap graphics. I believe Walker is mistaken about Centuri's
role; that Zilec developed the extant version (possibly giving the job
to the Stampers), and that Centuri was the U.S. distributor.
Game 220: The Pit
Holy smokes, this is Boulder Dash. Can't be a coincidence.
Digging
and boulder-dropping might have been seen before in Dig Dug and Mr. Do!
(incidentally, Walker claims The Pit influenced both, but personally I
don't find his anecdote credible), but not like this. In those games,
dirt and rocks are tools for destroying your enemies. Here, navigating
the terrain and grabbing the diamonds is your ultimate goal, and the boulders are obstacles to impede your path. There are
enemies, but they mostly wander aimlessly.
You
can "win" without collecting all of the gems, but if you're going for a
high score it's pretty much required; collecting six will double your
bonus, but collecting all seven will triple it. I managed this three
times before the game got too fast to handle.
GAB rating: Above Average.
The Pit, whether the Stampers had anything to do with it or not, is
pretty fun! There's almost an Indiana Jones-like feel in places,
especially the main gem room where disturbing the treasure activates a
deadly arrow trap.
But
there's an almost fatal flaw - the controls are horribly twitchy. Often
times you've got to dig a space with absolutely perfect pixel
precision, and while sometimes you can bump against impassable terrain
features to align yourself, this isn't always a possibility. The worst
example of this is the single-tile bottleneck passage above the acid
pit, which you must exit through to return to your ship, and the
moment you enter this room, the floor begins to drop under your feet,
giving you no time at all to adjust your position to the precise pixel
alignment necessary.
Also, turning around to shoot a pursuing enemy is risky, as you're likely to just fumble into his deadly grasp.
To
be fair, The Pit is otherwise a rather easy game. There's only one
level, with only two possible boulder layouts, and everything is pretty
deterministic. Still, it's frustrating when virtually every death feels
like the fault of the controls.
Also, can I just say, I find the death animations in this game oddly horrific.
Mobygames directly credits Zilec's next game to the Stampers and Lathbury, whose names all appear in the ROM code.
Game 221: Blueprint
If
this isn't the first "Rare" game, it's the first that feels like one,
with its quirky humor, its sentient googly-eyed things, and generally
weird Britishness.
The
Pac-Man inspiration is obvious, but this one's pretty unique as far as
maze games go. There are ten houses, and eight of them have machine
parts that you must bring to the 1:1 scale blueprint to assemble your
contraption. Enter a house that doesn't have a part - either because it
never had one, or because you already took it and forgot - and you get a
bomb, which you've got to dispose of before it explodes and kills you.
Sometimes it's a short-fused red bomb, and depending on how far away you
are from the bomb disposal pit you might not even have a chance to get
rid of it even if you sprint, which depletes from a meter. Sometimes a
monster emerges from the pit and tries to sabotage your machine, which
isn't a big deal as the parts just collapse and you can reassemble it
with too much trouble, but it's better to just catch it and drag it back
to the pit to avoid this altogether. As a non-diegetic time limit, a
monster chases your girlfriend, costing you a try when he catches her,
and occasionally knocks over flower pots which bounce around the level
in a semi-random fashion, killing you on contact.
Once
you assemble the machine, you have to start it up, and then awkwardly
use it to destroy the monster. I could never quite figure out its
controls - it seems to fire tennis balls when it wants, in the direction
it wants, and if they hit the monster, great.
Then
it repeats, with a monster wandering the maze to slow you down and
perhaps make the memorization aspect a bit more difficult.
GAB Rating: Average. There's nothing really wrong with this game, but I didn't find it all that challenging or fun.
The
Stampers' independent studio - Ashby Computers and Graphics Ltd. - did
produce one arcade game, Dingo, which bears their logo, and was licensed
through Jaleco rather than Zilec. This is, to my knowledge, the only
game predating Jetpac that is officially credited to them. I don't care
to play this game in depth - I personally found it simplistic and dull -
but I just wanted to acknowledge its existence.
Game 222: Jetpac
Jetpac
might not actually be the first "Rare" game, but it was the first
that the Stampers produced and distributed independently, and their first to be designed
for the home microcomputers that were quickly taking over Britain. They
targeted the 16KB ZX Spectrum, being cheap and popular, but thanks to
their experience in the regimented arcade industry, they worked with a
professionalism more characteristic of American imports than of the
so-called bedroom programmers who coded the majority of the British
market's homespun computer games on their own budget machines.
The
product is a pretty solid and original arcade-style game that controls
well and clips at a decent speed and frame rate, though the visual
limitations of the popularly priced Spectrum certainly show.
Your
goal is to assemble a shuttle from pieces lying around the stage - we
can see this assembly goal previously in Blueprint - and then fuel it
while avoiding or shooting deadly comets, and collecting any valuables
that might land in your vicinity. Then you blast off to the next planet
to collect more fuel and treasures while deadlier fuzzy aliens attack.
Come to think of it, we've also seen this interstellar looting before in
The Pit.
There
are eight stages per loop, each with a different type of alien threat.
Notably, each of the eight types of aliens have completely different
movement patterns, and need different tactics to avoid. The final and
most difficult type are these googly-eyed frog-like monsters that
pursue you relentlessly, but you're fairly safe from them (and most other
things for that matter) on the upper-right platform. Only stages 1 and 5
require you to assemble the shuttle. There are four shuttle models in
total, and you'll need to go through the game loop twice to see them
all.
Although
it plays like an arcade game of the time, Jetpac plays much more fairly
than most, given that Ultimate already has your money and can't munch
your tenpence any further. It's not completely fair - sometimes
fuel appears on the edges of the screen, where aliens are likely to
spawn without warning, but I managed to loop through the game twice
anyway. Figuring out the safety zones during the more difficult stages
made all the difference.
GAB rating: Good.
Sure, it's ugly and repetitive, and the sound effects all sound like
farts, but you know what? It's original, inoffensive, and I had fun
playing it.
Ultimate
Play the Game continued to focus on the ZX Spectrum as late as 1987,
but their best titles all had releases in 1983 or 1984, and virtually
every list of top games on the platform contains a few of them. Later
titles sold well enough but had lukewarm critical reception. 1988's
"Collected Works" compilation contained 11 of the 13 house-developed
Spectrum games, missing only the well-received Underwurlde, and the not
so well-received Pentagram. There were also a few Commodore exclusives,
which were downright reviled.
Jetpac
remained one of Ultimate's best selling and best reviewed titles of all
time. Though a May release, it continued to topped the Spectrum sales charts by the holiday season. Any
ranking of the games by Ultimate usually have Jetpac or 1984's Knight
Lore at the top, and every list of top games of the platform that I've
ever seen has one or both on it. It sold 300,000 copies - an astounding figure considering the Spectrum itself only reached 500,000 sales in 1983. Jetpac had one immediate sequel - Lunar Jetman on the Spectrum later that year. Years later in 1990, Rare produced Solar Jetman for the NES, and in 2007, a remake Jetpac Refuelled on XBLA.
