Ultimate Play The Game

Ultimate were a very successful development and publishing company on the old 8-bit micros, but predominatly on the Sinclair Spectrum. Owned by Chris and Tim Stamper, their range of games for the 16k and 48k Spectrum machines are still held in high regard by many nostalgic Spectrum owners today.

Ultimate's Spectrum titles included Psst, Cookie, Transam, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde, Knightlore, Alien 8, Cyberun, Nightshade, Gunfright, Pentagram, and Bubbler.

Back in 1985, Telecomsoft struck a deal with Ultimate to develop and publish Commodore 64 conversions of some of Ultimate's Spectrum games. It was a strange decision in hindsight, as Ultimate had already entered the C64 market with C64-only titles Blackwyche, Entombed, The Staff of Karnath, Dragonskulle (collectively known as the Arthur Pendragon series), Imhotep and Outlaws.

However, what Telecomsoft did have was an already established publication and distribution setup in the US, which was used to get the Ultimate games into the US Market via the Silverdisk range, which released C64 disk only games with one game on each side of the disk.

Ultimately (pun intended!), only three C64 versions were published under the deal - Sabre Wulf (converted by Greg Duddle of Mr Micro Ltd), Nightshade (converted by Shahid Ahmad of P.S.I.) and Underwurlde (converted by Softstone), and none of the conversions were received with much enthusiasm in the C64 market. They were essentially direct conversions from the Spectrum and hadn't been improved or enhanced in any way. The C64 conversion of Night Shade even appeared to suffer from the Spectrum's infamous attribute clash!

Sabre Wulf and Underwurlde were released together on one C64 disk in the US, but there's no evidence to show that Nightshade ever got a US release.

Ultimate saw where the 8-bit market was heading and so decided shortly afterwards to sell part of the Ultimate name to U.S. Gold. There's no evidence to suggest that a possible deal was ever on the cards with Telecomsoft for the label, but it seems likely that the C64 conversions were a first tentative toe in the water to selling Ultimate.