http://www.screenagercentral.com/futurelooks/break/stamper/index.

html Go MAY MAY JUN

👤 ⍰❎
22 captures 26 f🐦
19 Dec 2003 - 3 Apr 2016 2006 2007 2016 ▾ About this capture

join newsletter

NeuNeo HVD108
High Definition DVD
player Review
City of Heroes PC
Game Review
Samsung Syncmaster
Tim Stamper: Rare Creative Force
193P 19 inch LCD By Steven Kent for Screenager Central
Monitor Review Making games was simpler back in the early eighties -- most of the early
Samsung YEPP YP- arcade classics contained less than 30,000 bytes of information. Compared
T5H 128MB built-in www.xincom.com
to today's biggest titles, some of which come on multiple CDs that can
flash memory MP3 contain as much as 640,000,000 bytes of information, the early games
player with FM tuner were little more than warm-up exercises.
Review www.samsung.ca
Futurelooks' HALO 2
Preview for the xBox
Microsoft Age of
Mythology Gold
Edition for the PC
Review In short, even though there is a tendency to think of Donkey Kong Country, the most popular game
[View All Reviews] to appear on the SNES, as a Tim Stamper game, a lot of other people worked on it.
www.compgeeks.com
In fact, rather than wonder why the top names in gaming are so unknown, you may want to question
what their role in game creation has become? Has game creation reached the point at which greats
like Yu Suzuki and or Tim Stamper simply chair the committees working on Virtua Fighter and
Valentine's Day: Donkey Kong games?
Alternative Fun for the
Single Techie We sat down with Tim Stamper -- the leading creative force behind Rare Ltd., formerly one of
Futurelooks CES Nintendo's most influential partners.
2005 Photo Essay
Report Tim Stamper has a terse definition of the term game. "A game is a set of rules that are established
Futurelooks 2004 that you have to abide by. You can only jump a certain distance or a certain height. You have to learn
Holiday Gift Guides: the certain speed ability and the amount of communication you have with other elements to win the
Something for Every game. It's a combination of rules that makes a video game."
Gamer this Christmas!
Futurelooks 2004 Stamper is the leading creative force behind Rare Ltd., one of Nintendo's most influential partners. In
Holiday Gift Guides: 1994, Rare emerged as a leading game developer for the SNES with the release of Donkey Kong
Tried and Tested Gifts Country -- the most popular game for the SNES. A few years later, Rare contributed two major hits
for Every Techie for the N64: Goldeneye 007 and Diddy Kong Racing.
Futurelooks 2004
Holiday Gift Guides: Stamper lives and works at Rare headquarters, a converted farm house in a small English village a
Gifts for Every Level of few hours north of London. There is no point in discussing Tim Stamper's creative achievements,
Techie! however, without widening the discussion to include his older brother Chris.
Surf Safe
[View All Articles] The Stampers grew up as middle-class kids. Chris always showed a gift for working with electronics
and built an oscilloscope as a kid. After graduating from school, he took a job converting Space
Invaders machines. Tim got his first introduction to the video game business by helping Chris.

The Stampers always believed that they could make great games given the chance, so they started
their own company. During the mid-eighties, the Stampers designed popular games for the Sinclair
PrimeFilm PF3650
Computer, a home computer that caught on better in Europe than the United States.
PRO3 Film Scanner
Review
As the popularity of the Sinclair began to wane, Joel Hochberg, the Stampers' American partner,
AOpen A600
showed them a new game system that had recently hit the market in Japan. The system was the
Midtower Case
Famicom, the console that would later be released as the NES in the West. The Stampers were
Review
impressed and decided to ally themselves with Nintendo.
Zalman RS6F
"Theatre 6"
Unfortunately, Nintendo wasn't particularly interested in setting up partnerships with Western
Headphones
development companies at the time.
Reviewed
Fossil Microsoft Wrist
"We went to Mr. Arakawa and told him that we wanted to make games for Nintendo, and he said
Net MSNDirect SPOT
fine," says Chris Stamper. "Originally we went to him and asked for the technical specs, but we
Watch
couldn't get those, so I reverse- engineered the NES. I understood coin-op hardware, so I had a
Build a PC from parts
good idea of what the Nintendo actually contained."
to software: the right
way (guide)
"We produced a demo. When Mr. Arakawa saw the demo, he said 'Okay, you have our blessings', and
Albatron FX5900
gave us the full specifications."
Turbo (FX5900QV)
256MB Video Card
"I think Chris got it about 99% correct," says Tim Stamper. "There were just a few things we didn't
Review
know about. But the interesting thing was that there were things about the machine that Chris
[View All News]
discovered that weren't documented that instantly gave us an advantage which other developers
didn't have."

Among other things, Stamper discovered that the NES could play games in a split-screen mode. Prior
to Rare's reinvention of the NES, nobody had looked into doing split-screen games. Other companies
had made two-player games, but they were always single-screen games such as Contra, from
Konami, and Double Dragon, from Trade West.

Rare's first NES game was Slalom, a somewhat forgettable skiing simulation. The company's second
NES game, R.C. Pro Am, was mostly the work of Chris Stamper. It was the first NES game to feature
split-screen competition. This radio-controlled car racing simulation is generally considered one of the
best games of its time.

R.C. Pro Am was just one of more than 60 games that Rare developed for the NES. Though the
Stampers preferred to run a small and anonymous operation through the eighties, they managed to
develop games for Acclaim, Milton Bradley, and other better known companies. The NES versions of
Wizards and Warriors, Jordan vs Bird, Marble Madness, and Battletoads were all Rare games.

After several years of being one of the most active and respected developers for the NES, Rare went
silent after developing only two games for the Super Nintendo (SNES)-Battletoads and
Battletoads/Double Dragon.

"We saw a lot of companies porting games over from 8-bit and other systems," says Joel Hochberg,
the president of Rare. "Frankly, we didn't want to become a rubber stamp company, so we put our
efforts into developing new technology instead of more software."

While they were working on Battletoads/Double Dragon, Hochberg and the Stampers went to a
meeting at Nintendo's Redmond, Washington headquarters. They did not like what they saw. With
very few exceptions, the games slated to come out for the SNES were conversions of NES titles.

"As creative people, we didn't want to be a sort of conversion house for major third-party
developers," says Chris Stamper. "We wanted to work on new ideas."

While they were in Redmond, Hochberg and the Stampers went to a nearby Denny's Restaurant to
discuss the situation. They agreed that they wanted to continue working with Nintendo but that they
did not like the direction the SNES was taking. Tim Stamper wanted to get out from behind the
shadows of the game companies that sold Rare games under their own label. Hochberg worried
about the financial pitfalls of becoming a publisher. It was at this time that Chris Stamper first
proposed developing the new technology that would distinguish Rare's games.

By now such computer games as Myst and The 7th Guest had appeared on the market. Stamper
believed he could produce games with similarly high-quality graphics on the SNES. His plan was
risky, however. It meant that Rare would temporarily become a technology company instead of a
game developer. The company's assets would be tied into buying equipment and there would be no
time to earn more money by creating games. They agreed to try it. As Hochberg puts it, "Investment
in the future was first and foremost."

The next few years did not go well for Nintendo. Thanks to the popularity of Sonic the Hedgehog and
a very smart image and advertising campaign, the Sega Genesis emerged as the leading 16-bit
game system.

In late 1993, Sega further strengthened its grip on the market when Acclaim released Mortal
Kombat. Trying to maintain its kid-friendly image, Nintendo had Acclaim remove some of the
bloodiest moves from the game. Sega, on the other hand, wanted to escape the "games for kids"
image and left the game unedited. Sega's approach won out, and Acclaim sold more than twice as
many copies of the Genesis version of the game.

From the outside, it looked as if Rare was sitting out the battle; but that was hardly the case.

Earlier that year, Genyo Takeda, the Nintendo engineer behind the design of the N64 controller, had
gone to England to visit Rare. By this time, Chris had built a device that could port graphics from a
Silicon Graphics workstation to a SNES.

"We had a visit from Mr. Takeda," says Chris Stamper. "We decided to show him a demonstration of a
boxing game we had created using rendered graphics on a Silicon Graphics workstation. He was very
impressed and asked what it would look like on a SNES; so into the evening and the next day we had
two of our engineers work on taking the 24-bit true color imagery and converting it to SNES."

Takeda was stunned when the Stampers streamed the boxing game through a SNES station the next
day. The game was virtually unchanged. Suddenly the SNES could run modeled images.

Takeda returned to Nintendo Company Ltd. (NCL) and told Hiroshi Yamauchi about the Stamper's
game. It did not take long for Yamauchi to invite the Stampers to demonstrate their new technology
in Japan. Yamauchi was so impressed he asked them to build a flagship game for the SNES.

Tim Stamper's response was a near sacrilege--he asked for permission to build a game using Donkey
Kong, one of the pantheon of characters created by Shigeru Miyamoto.

Stamper says that the reason he asked for Donkey Kong was that Nintendo's great ape was well-
known but long out of circulation. "We didn't want to do a Mario game because Mr. Miyamoto was
doing Mario and we wanted a character that we could take in our own direction."

In an unusual display of good faith, Nintendo granted Rare permission to create the first new Donkey
Kong game in nearly ten years. (Though Donkey Kong did appear in Super Mario Kart, the last new
game with Donkey Kong was Donkey Kong Math for the NES.)

Shigeru Miyamoto offered a little creative advice as the Stampers began the project. He sent Rare
some sketches and concept art of Donkey Kong from Kyoto; but on the most part, Stamper and his
team had free reign on the project.

Tim Stamper used some surprisingly unsophisticated techniques to create Donkey Kong Country. He
and his team designed the levels using yellow Post-It notes. They would sketch small sections on
each sheet, then attach them to a table in sequential order.

Stamper's team was equally utilitarian about the final look of the game. When it came to selecting
textures, they took whatever they needed. When they wanted a texture for trees, an employee
snapped a branch from a pine tree and scanned it into a computer. When they needed a texture for
rusty iron surfaces, the technician grabbed an old shovel from outside.

Donkey Kong Country changed history. Besides being the most popular game for the SNES, it was
the game that turned the tides of the 16-bit battles. Nintendo released the game in time for the
1994 Christmas season.

Donkey Kong Country not only turned the balance of the 16-bit wars in Nintendo's favor, it
completely killed the market for the first next generation game consoles. Trip Hawkins had worked
hard to position the 3DO as the most advanced video game system ever made and had done a great
job of promoting his system as vastly superior to the Atari Jaguar. When Donkey Kong Country came
out, interest in the 3DO and the Jaguar faded--suddenly 16-bit consoles seemed just as powerful as
the new 32-bit systems.

"We were really surprised by Donkey Kong Country," admits RJ Mical, the co-designer of the 3DO
Multiplayer. "We looked at that game and decided that perhaps the SNEEZE (Mical's name for the
SNES) could do everything they said it could."

Donkey Kong Country was Tim Stamper's last direct

project. Later Donkey Kong games were designed by other
teams, and though Tim lent a creative hand with the Online Music Stores
design of Banjo-Kazooie and other games, he no longer Trashcan Couture
leads Rare's creative teams.

Interestingly, Chris Stamper has been a bit more active

than his brother, of late. Best known for creating RC Racer for the NES, Chris led the team that
created Diddy Kong Racing for Nintendo 64 in 1997.

Copyright © 2007 Studio One Networks. All rights reserved.

© 1999 - 2004 Futurelooks Marketing Group. Terms of Use. Backend by David Grampa & Dylan Lopez
Site design by Byron Berry