A Fun Enough Game in a Weird Time-Frame.
Rare's first game, well... I guess it was Rare in a sense, was Jetpac, a game that was as simplistic as the Spectrum was blargh. It's a game that sold in excess of 300,000 units on the Spectrum when there were only 1 Million Spectrum owners out there. It's a game that sold more than almost any game on the system or on multiple systems at the time... and weirdly enough, I can see why. In a time where the world had seen the future with Pac-Man, but the home video game market would remain in the stone-age until Nintendo would pick up the pace with the Famicom in 1984, Spectrum owners especially were a sub-culture of their own. The US basically wouldn't know what a Spectrum was if you smacked it across their face and the UK was waging war with several other home PC's.
Games usually wouldn't go beyond a black background and collecting things for points at that time and Jetpac is basically no different. So in a sense it was a very pure experience at the time, your game had to do nothing but be incredibly fun to stand out among the crowd... and Jetpac did just that. The controls were fluid and awesome, the graphics were colorful and their was no slowdown. Jetpac was beyond what Spectrum developers were doing at the time and its sales shows that. I found it to be a lot of fun, if quite obviously primitive.
