Ultimate Play The Game - Authorship

Authorship

The company's secretive tendencies also extended to the question of who wrote the games. Whereas most games of the time would list those responsible on the cassette inlay cards or even on the front of the box (one notable example, Football Manager, even going as far as to feature a picture of author Kevin Toms on the front of the box), no Ultimate title ever mentioned any names at all, and the authorship of some of them remains unclear.

The Ultimate titles up to Gunfright were produced primarily by Tim and Chris Stamper, Tim provided the graphics and Chris the programming, along with fellow founders John Lathbury (coding) and Carol Ward (graphic design). Tim also created the cover art for the games, including the famous Ultimate Play The Game logo. The Stampers retained the major creative roles until the purchase by U.S. Gold, who brought in their own programming teams to create Martianoids and Bubbler. The exact authorship of Pentagram and Cyberun is known only to those involved; often considered U.S. Gold games, they are both possibly Stamper games. This remains a possibility as although Chris Stamper has said in an interview, "What was the last one we developed as a team? It was Gunfright, I think", Ultimate had already admitted to developing games in an order different from that of their release, as with Knight Lore and Sabre Wulf.

The authorship of the Commodore 64 titles is even more uncertain. The conversions of existing Spectrum games Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde and Nightshade were handled by Firebird, who hired Mr Micro, Softstone, and PSI, respectively, to develop the titles. Imhotep was submitted to Ultimate in a virtually complete form by author Manuel Caballero, who had previously written Batty Builders and Firefleet. Ultimate did not make any announcements regarding the authorship of the other Commodore games, but an article by Martyn Carroll revealed how Frank Gasking of "Games that weren't 64" managed to identify the creators as Dave and Robert (Bob) Thomas based on a message that appears on the final screen of Dragonskulle. These two brothers were also the creators of the previous three games of the series The Staff of Karnath, Entombed and Blackwyche.