It takes courage to walk away from something exceptional, but in the mid-Eighties Tim and Chris Stamper did exactly that. They left behind the British home-computer games market where they had excelled. They trusted their highly respected Ultimate label to others. They set out on a new path, created a new company and bet everything on a Japanese games console. The gamble would pay off handsomely. According to an article on IGN, the Stampers visited Nintendo and revealed how they had reverse-engineered the Famicom. Nintendo was so impressed that it offered the Stampers an unlimited budget to produce games for the console, free of the restrictions that hindered other developers.
Coder Paul Machacek was one of the teenagers that the Stampers hired for their fresh endeavour Rare, and he views its formation as timely. “Rare was incorporated in 1985 in order to switch focus from the domestic market, which had crashed [Acorn and Sinclair were suffering major financial issues, while Sinclair distributor Prism and Oric both collapsed], to the new Nintendo system,” Paul notes. “It was unknown in the UK, but was selling well in Japan and was launching in the US. It was obvious Rare needed a wider output, so it began hiring. I was unusual in that I moved some distance, but everyone else at Rare in the late-Eighties lived locally, and we were
