When Jetpac landed on the Spectrum in 1983, it wasn’t just that it was a great game. The slick presentation, the tight, bug-free gameplay, the easy to learn, difficult to master premise… it felt like it could have been an arcade game, the ultimate accolade back then. The truth is, it could have been. By the time it was released, Chris and Tim Stamper had been developing coin-op titles for Burton-based company Zilec Electronics for almost three years.
To piece together this seldom told part of the Rare story, we have three valuable sources. Stuart and this parish, did some excellent digging in a 2019 blog post and came up with a list of a dozen arcade games which could potentially be the work of the Stampers, which conveniently matched the number mentioned in a feature on Ultimate Play The Game in issue 22 of . One of Stuart’s tech-savvy readers then delved into the code of the list of suspects and discovered copyright text confirming Chris and Tim Stamper, together with John Lathbury, cofounder of Ultimate, as creators of six arcade titles – , (also known as ), , , and .
