Chris Stamper

The Stamper brothers—Tim and Chris Stamper—founded the British video game companies Ultimate Play the Game and Rare. They first worked together on arcade conversion kits, which were licensed to companies, but later became developers for the ZX Spectrum home computer in the early 1980s. Chris programmed and Tim designed the graphics. They found success as Ultimate with games including Jetpac and Knight Lore. The brothers founded Rare in the mid-1980s after reverse engineering the Nintendo Entertainment System to shift their focus to console development. They became Nintendo's first major Western developer, for whom they developed licensed games and ports. Over the next two decades, Rare enjoyed a close relationship with Nintendo and developed multiple major titles for the company, including Donkey Kong Country and GoldenEye 007. Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, and the brothers left the company in 2006. The brothers are planning new ventures.

The brothers were famously taciturn toward the press, and known for their work ethic and promotion of inter-team competition at Rare. They enjoyed a fervent fandom in the 1980s, were among the most influential developers of the 1990s, and were named "Development Legends" at the video game industry trade magazine Develop's 2015 awards.

Chris Stamper was born in October 1958. He had a long-standing interest in electronics, and built an oscilloscope in his youth. While at university, he built a kit computer with an 8-bit processor and taught himself how to program by creating traffic light signalling software. He attended Loughborough University of Technology with the intent of earning degrees in electronics and physics, but left the university in 1981 to pursue computer programming full-time. Chris worked with arcade machine electronics, resolving software bugs and converting Space Invaders into Galaxian machines. He persuaded his brother Tim, two years younger (b. February 1961) to join him. The brothers worked as game designers at the arcade game company Associated Leisure with a college friend, John Lathbury. They followed the company's director when he started his own business, Zilec Electronics, a small company that worked on arcade conversions. They worked on 12 arcade games, including Gyruss and Blue Print, and others whose names were kept secret and sold to other arcade manufacturers, including Konami and Sega. The job included international travel to Japan, where the brothers became acquainted with the Japanese game industry. During this time, Chris purchased, studied, and taught himself to program the new ZX80 processor within two years.

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