Ultimate look back on the early days with nostalgia. "They were great times. When we had deliveries we would store goods in the toilet, on the stairs, in our bedrooms. We had no money - when bills came in we all chipped in. The electricity one was always huge but we made sure that was paid first. We spent the first six months concentrating on JetPac, our first game on cassette". The debts were mounting up and they were getting worried but JetPac was a huge success. It sold 330,000. At £5.50 each that's £1.8 million !!!

JetPac was a single screen shoot-em-up. You were a man in a jet pack (surprisingly) armed with a laser. Firstly you had to assemble your ship, then you had to refuel to escape the planet while collecting as many bonuses as you could when you where there. The screen had three small platforms and was viewed from the side. Of course they were inhabited by such things as fireballs, big balloons, froggy aliens, fighter planes, millenium falcons and round furry aliens. When I played the game in preparation for writing this article I was impressed how fast it was. You whip around the screen at quite a rate and so do the varied colourful aliens. If it looks professional now imagine what it looked like in 1983. There was one little flaw. If you stayed on the platform at the top right and kept firing left and right you were safe. You only had to stray to collect fuel. This way you could amass huge scores but it wasn't as much fun.

In the summer 1983 edition of Personal Computer Games they described themselves as "The most experienced arcade video game design team in Britain". It's members were some of the first people to produce arcade games for the US and Japan.

"We were unhappy working for someone else, so we decoded to set up our own company" said Ultimate's director Timothy Stamper. "The two brothers were designers of arcade machine programs while based in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. They designed coin-op games and then licenced them to America and Japan".

JetPac was released in May 1983. Pssst followed in June and at the end of July, Trans Am and Cookie were released. This first wave of releases got universal good reviews. In a time when some games were still written in basic, Ultimate games were fast and sleek. They were written completely in Z80 machine code, had large cartoon graphics and good animation, used simple sound well and were very playable. The quality was obvious from the start when a colourful artistic loading screen always greeted you while you waited for the game to load. Once in the game there were plenty of joystick options and a quick tune as your begun. It's also astounding to think that these first four games all ran on the smallest Spectrum, the 16K model.