How Rare unlocked the secrets of the NES – GamesTM Interview
The following interview was featured on GamesTM, on April 29th, 2010. Since that time, the website has become defunct. A back-up of this page can be found on Archive.org and is further preserved here for posterity.
Rare and Nintendo enjoyed one of the most successful partnerships in gaming history, yet very little is known about how the relationship began. games™ discovers how the Stamper brothers unlocked the door to the Japanese gaming giant, and talks to the man who provided the key.
Everyone knows that Rare rose from the ashes of Ultimate Play The Game. In late 1985, Ultimate founders Chris and Tim Stamper sold the company name and its gaming catalogue to US Gold. The reason for the sale was simple: producing games for Ultimate’s core platform – the Sinclair Spectrum – was no longer making enough money to fund expansion. The brothers had pretty much pushed the Spectrum to its limits with groundbreaking games like Underwurlde and Knightlore, and the titles they released for other 8-bit computers failed to emulate the sales success of the Speccy originals. So they sold Ultimate and formed Rare to develop games for the Nintendo Famicom/NES, a platform with global reach and amazing potential. Rare went on to release dozens of games for the Nintendo console and the two firms forged a close alliance that flourished during the 1990s. But you knew that already. What you probably don’t know are the lengths Rare took to court Nintendo and consummate that relationship.
Nintendo was famously fussy when it came to selecting third-party developers and the UK counted for nothing over in Japan. As an induction process, Nintendo required potential developers to produce an example of a working game for the NES without any assistance or technical documentation. Rare accepted the challenge, but the problem was that Chris Stamper was a talented Z80 programmer and the NES was powered by the 6502 processor. Luckily, they had a 6502 developer in their midst.
Dave Thomas honed his programming skills on a succession of 6502-powered computers. He learnt to code on an Acorn Atom, then upgraded to an Atari 400 and used it to write his first published game (the space shooter Warlok). It was then a quick jump to the Commodore 64, where he teamed up with his brother Bob to create an arcade adventure set in a creepy castle (Dave did the coding, while Bob drew the graphics). The game was called Staff Of Karnath and the pair aimed high by offering the finished game to the Stampers before contacting any other publisher. To their immense surprise, Tim Stamper rolled up at their door in his Porsche 911 Turbo and offered them a four-game deal on the spot.
Staff Of Karnath was released in December 1984 to immediate acclaim. Personal Computer Games magazine awarded it 9/10 and it sold more than 40,000 copies. The game’s star, Sir Arthur Pendragon, went on to appear in a further three C64 adventures – Entombed, Blackwyche and Dragonskulle. Each successive game sold fewer and fewer, resulting in dwindling royalty payments for the Thomas brothers, so it was a relief when the Stampers invited them to join Rare. “When we finished the Arthur Pendragon titles we were asked if we wanted to look into developing for the Nintendo Entertainment System,” Dave tells us. “The NES was yet another 6502-based system and so seemed ideal to move onto, with the promise of a substantial income from any titles we produced for it. The brief from Nintendo in Japan was to effectively ‘prove’ you were able to develop for the system by showing you had the technical and programming expertise and produce a game demo.”
Rare had to reverse-engineer the NES to have any hope of understanding how Nintendo’s box of tricks worked. “Chris Stamper supplied a PC and he was able to put together a device which enabled code to be downloaded via the parallel interface onto a cartridge inserted into the console,” reveals Dave. “This gave us the ability to poke around the various memory locations and try to find how the graphics and sounds were activated. It was literally a case of sending values to the ROM addresses one by one until something happened.”
After spending a few weeks poking the hardware addresses to discover what they did, Dave had sussed out enough of the NES’s inner workings to begin to develop a working game example. “I started to put together a demo with Bob. We decided that something simple would be appropriate and so developed a game called Space Hunter which was a vertical-scrolling shoot-’em-up utilising the console’s sprite and smooth-scrolling background capabilities along with various sound effects and some music. Once we were happy with the game it was sent to Japan for evaluation by Nintendo.” A few weeks passed and good news arrived from Nintendo HQ. “They decided that we’d proved ourselves capable of developing for the console and ironically then sent us all the technical manuals for it! Henceforth started Rare’s long association with Nintendo.”
That’s right, without Space Hunter there would be no Donkey Kong Country, no GoldenEye, no It’s Mr Pants. However, Rare’s first ever NES game served only as a proof of concept and a foot in Nintendo’s door. “Although Space Hunter was our own original product which was completed,” says Dave.
“Tim and Chris decided they didn’t want to release it.” Undeterred, Dave and Bob pressed on with the hope of creating a game that Rare could license to Nintendo – with the prospect of a healthy payday awaiting them when that happened. “Once we had received the technical manuals from Nintendo, we could start working on games for it in earnest. Bob and I created a number of game demos for the console over the following months, the only one of which I can recall was called BC Games. This was a kind of ‘Stone Age Olympics’ with echoes of The Flintstones and featured comical dinosaur racing and such like. I think in the end we spent 18 months working on the NES creating demos, none of which Tim or Chris were happy with and they never saw the light of day.”
Did the Stampers have any particular issues with the games? Was it perhaps thought that they wouldn’t work as Nintendo products? “I can’t remember a great deal about specifics,” answers Dave. “We just got the impression in the end that no matter what we produced they wouldn’t have released it. My feeling was that they wanted total control over the products and didn’t want an ‘outside’ team getting the first Rare product release. Whenever we got close to finishing a title they would suddenly say they were no longer interested in releasing it. After this happened with three or four games in a row, Bob and I were left completely skint. Unfortunately for us, during the whole time we’d spent working on the initial development for Space Hunter and the later games we weren’t being paid a penny.” Surely they received a down payment, a retainer, or at least some expenses? “No, we received absolutely nothing. Needless to say, we soon ran out of finances and had to pull out of our relationship with the Stampers. Looking back I think we were incredibly naive, but the hook was that, had a single one of the games we’d created for the NES actually been published, we’d have made hundreds of thousands of dollars from it so I think this kept us ploughing on for longer than we perhaps should have done. In the end we had no alternative but to pull out and go elsewhere for work.”
Dave and Bob went cap in hand to Steve Wilcox of Elite Systems, who offered them the job of converting the Buggy Boy coin-op to the C64. They gladly accepted and Dave in particular was pleased to be working on the old beige bread bin once again. “The NES was a fair bit more difficult and restrictive to write for than the C64. We used to have to burn the games onto EPROM chips every time we wanted to test anything and the old chips then went into a UV eraser. The chips frequently failed, so it was a real hassle.” Steve was initially reluctant to give them the gig, as he thought they may have lost touch with the C64?s capabilities having spent a couple of years on the NES, so the brothers were determined to repay his faith. “We had the original arcade machine on loan and we videoed and played as much of it as we could to get the exact position of all the gates and flags. We really wanted to do a good job and spent absolutely ages mapping the game out so it was as authentic as possible given the limitations of the C64.” Their commitment paid off and the game received excellent reviews from all quarters. It was easily the best home conversion of Buggy Boy on any machine, and some would argue that it was even more playable than Tatsumi’s arcade original.
The Stampers, meanwhile, pushed on with their NES plans and games started to arrive in the US towards the end of 1987. The downhill skiing game Slalom appeared first and this was followed by action platformer Wizards & Warriors. In December ’87 Tim Stamper revealed that they’d completed work on six games and a further eight were in development. Any lingering doubts that the Stampers should have stuck with Ultimate and the Speccy were immediately dispelled by the release of R.C. Pro-Am in spring 1988. This classic isometric racer was a huge hit, clocking up worldwide sales of 2.3 million. Rare had truly arrived on the NES, and between 1987 and 1991 they released more than 40 titles for the console, including a mix of original games, arcade conversions and film/TV licences.
Looking back, Dave is hardly surprised that Rare and Nintendo worked so well together as the signs were there from the start. “The relationship seemed to be very good from what I gathered. I recall the Stampers visiting Japan on occasion and Nintendo always seemed impressed by the work that was shown to them.”
We wondered if he felt any bitterness toward the Stampers, particularly as Dave and Bob’s Space Hunter game was instrumental in opening the door to Nintendo and yet they never managed to benefit from the situation. “Clearly the Stampers have profited greatly from the relationship with Nintendo. However, they were supremely talented and I’m sure would have achieved this with or without our initial help. Bob and I took a huge financial risk in working on the initial Nintendo development and so did they. The fact was that they had much greater resources than ourselves and were able to stay the course. I do think, though, that it’s a shame they weren’t prepared to acknowledge the contribution we had made or even give us a simple thanks at the time.”
Their efforts were not entirely in vain however. Around three years after parting company with the Stampers, Rare asked Dave and Bob to create NES versions of two coin-ops – the hyper-violent shooter NARC and the arcade basketball game Arch Rivals. In accepting, they were able to proudly state on their CVs that they’d developed games for both Ultimate and Rare, two of the UK’s most revered software houses.
“I suppose in the end it was a bitter-sweet time for us,” reflects Dave. “We had a lot of fun doing the Pendragon adventures and found the Stampers to be great to work for during this time. We visited them and their parents many times at Ashby and later at their farmhouse near Twycross. I think we were pretty much in awe of them and couldn’t quite believe we were working with them. We had a huge amount of respect for them and they were always very generous and warm people. This changed, though, when we moved onto the NES and we became increasingly frustrated. Who knows what we might have achieved had we been able to stick with it and produce that initial NES game. At the time, though, I remember thinking that this just wasn’t going to happen, and although we did eventually produce a couple of games for them, our relationship was never quite the same.”