Ultimate Play The Game (often shortened to just Ultimate) was a critically acclaimed video game developer of the early home computer era. "Ultimate Play The Game" was the trading name of Ashby Computers & Graphics Ltd. (ACG), a software company founded in 1982 by two ex-arcade game developers Tim and Chris Stamper. Ultimate released a series of successful games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, MSX and Commodore 64 computers from 1982 until its closure in 1988. Ultimate are perhaps best remembered for the big-selling titles Jetpac and Sabre Wulf, each of which sold over 300,000 copies in 1983 and 1984 respectively, and their groundbreaking series of isometric arcade adventures utilising a technique termed Filmation. Knight Lore, the first of the Filmation games, has been retrospectively described in the press as "seminal ... revolutionary" (GamesTM), "one of the most successful and influential games of all time" (X360), and "the greatest single advance in the history of computer games" (Edge).
By the time of the label's last use in 1988 on a retrospective compilation, Ultimate had evolved into Rare, and moved on to developing titles for Nintendo consoles. Rare was purchased by Microsoft in 2002 for US$377 million, a record price for a video game developer, and now develops exclusively for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. In 2006 Rare revived the Ultimate Play The Game name for an Xbox Live Arcade remake of Jetpac named Jetpac Refuelled.
Read more about Ultimate Play The Game: Commodore 64 Releases, Authorship
Famous quotes containing the words ultimate, play and/or game:
“Our drives are reducible to the will to power. The will to power is the ultimate fact at which we arrive.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Although adults have a role to play in teaching social skills to children, it is often best that they play it unobtrusively. In particular, adults must guard against embarrassing unskilled children by correcting them too publicly and against labeling children as shy in ways that may lead the children to see themselves in just that way.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“My first big mistake was made when, in a moment of weakness, I consented to learn the game; for a man who can frankly say “I do not play bridge” is allowed to go over in the corner and run the pianola by himself, while the poor neophyte, no matter how much he may protest that he isn’t “at all a good player, in fact I’m perfectly rotten,” is never believed, but dragged into a game where it is discovered, too late, that he spoke the truth.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)