Rare Co-Founder Tim Stamper Signals Plans to Share Forty Years of Preserved Game Development History

Ultimate Play the Game and Rare co-founder Tim Stamper announces intentions to share personal development archives dating from 1979 across 40 years of gaming history.

One of British videogame development's most influential and famously private figures has indicated that he intends to share historical material collected throughout his extraordinary career. Tim Stamper, co-founder of Ultimate Play the Game and Rare, published a new statement on October 28 explaining that he has preserved documents and other development-related items dating back to 1979. The announcement received additional specialist coverage on October 29 and follows an earlier social media message suggesting that Stamper was preparing to open a personal archive. Alongside his brother Chris, Stamper helped establish Ultimate Play the Game, the British studio responsible for influential eight-bit titles including Jetpac, Atic Atac and Sabre Wulf. The brothers subsequently founded Rare, which became one of the most important developers associated with Nintendo's sixteen-bit and sixty-four-bit consoles. Its catalogue includes Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, GoldenEye 007, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark. Stamper's statement is particularly interesting to videogame historians because early development documentation is frequently lost through studio closures, hardware disposal and changing storage formats. Original design sketches, programming notes, development builds and internal correspondence can provide invaluable insight into how influential games were created. However, Stamper has not yet published a confirmed catalogue of the materials he intends to share. No specific unreleased game, prototype, source-code archive or publication date has been announced. The development should therefore be understood as a statement of intent rather than confirmation that previously unseen software is about to become publicly available. Even with those limitations, the possibility of greater access to historically important material is welcome news for preservation enthusiasts. Rare's creative influence stretches across several generations of gaming hardware. Discovering more about its early development processes could help historians document a remarkable period of British videogame innovation. After decades of secrecy, Stamper appears ready to open the vault. What is actually inside remains the most interesting question.