|
|
| Tim Stamper: Rare Creative Force | | By Steven Kent for Screenager Central |
|
 |
Making games was simpler back in the early eighties -- most of the early arcade classics contained less than 30,000 bytes of information. Compared to today's biggest titles, some of which come on multiple CDs that can contain as much as 640,000,000 bytes of information, the early games were little more than warm-up exercises.
|
In short, even though there is a tendency to think of Donkey Kong Country, the most popular game to appear on the SNES, as a Tim Stamper game, a lot of other people worked on it.
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 Donkey Kong games?
We sat down with Tim Stamper -- the leading creative force behind Rare Ltd., formerly one of Nintendo's most influential partners.
Tim Stamper has a terse definition of the term game. "A game is a set of rules that are established that you have to abide by. You can only jump a certain distance or a certain height. You have to learn the certain speed ability and the amount of communication you have with other elements to win the game. It's a combination of rules that makes a video game."
Stamper is the leading creative force behind Rare Ltd., one of Nintendo's most influential partners. In 1994, Rare emerged as a leading game developer for the SNES with the release of Donkey Kong Country -- the most popular game for the SNES. A few years later, Rare contributed two major hits for the N64: Goldeneye 007 and Diddy Kong Racing.
Stamper lives and works at Rare headquarters, a converted farm house in a small English village a few hours north of London. There is no point in discussing Tim Stamper's creative achievements, however, without widening the discussion to include his older brother Chris.
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 Computer, a home computer that caught on better in Europe than the United States.
As the popularity of the Sinclair began to wane, Joel Hochberg, the Stampers' American partner, showed them a new game system that had recently hit the market in Japan. The system was the Famicom, the console that would later be released as the NES in the West. The Stampers were impressed and decided to ally themselves with Nintendo.
Unfortunately, Nintendo wasn't particularly interested in setting up partnerships with Western development companies at the time.
"We went to Mr. Arakawa and told him that we wanted to make games for Nintendo, and he said fine," says Chris Stamper. "Originally we went to him and asked for the technical specs, but we couldn't get those, so I reverse- engineered the NES. I understood coin-op hardware, so I had a good idea of what the Nintendo actually contained."
"We produced a demo. When Mr. Arakawa saw the demo, he said 'Okay, you have our blessings', and gave us the full specifications."
"I think Chris got it about 99% correct," says Tim Stamper. "There were just a few things we didn't know about. But the interesting thing was that there were things about the machine that Chris 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 design of Banjo-Kazooie and other games, he no longer 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.
|
|
|
U R WANTED: RATHER
ALIVE!!
POETRY / SHORT STORIES
Got a thing for writing, share
your poems and short stories with
the rest of the community.
FASHION & BEAUTY!
We're looking for you who knows a thing
or two about fashion & beauty and could
consider sharing your tips with the less
up- to-date of among us ;).
PHOTO / MUSIC
whether you having your pictures taken or are
yourself and aspiring photographer or maybe your
in a band. send us a reportage
[ FEEDBACK
FORM ]
|
MUSIC LABEL
|
|
we stay fresh &
we stay independent cause we believes in artistic freedom. Do you?
|
| music.nevaranta.com |
|
