Ultra

So just what is Ultra?
Ultra is a homage to the collosus Tempest in order to mark its 25th birthday, written for the PC, and available for you to download right here. Atari's classic arcade game was simply outstanding when it was released, but that was way back when in the days of our youth. Back here today, there's just nothing that you can play to relive that awesome gameplay alongside the immersive audio and visuals that we've all come to expect - until now.

Do you care?
You just might - but don't just take our word for it. Independent quotes from various sources around the internet include:

"Ultra is an absolutely luscious looking homage"

"the first thing that hits you is how f#cking beautiful the whole game is to look at"

"polished would be an ever so slight understatement"

"more eye-mongingly beautiful than Tempest1000 and infinitely more playable than Tsunami2010"

"bloody addictive and cheap"

"the updated graphics are a psychadelic trip, full of particle effects and glowy polygons"

"I can strongly recommend Ultra"

Why Tempest?
Tempest is just one of those special games that has no peers. In an industry where plagiarism is rampant, Tempest stands as an icon without equal. Sure, there has been the odd update to the game over the years, but none of these, in my opinion, has ever managed to capture the magic of the original. There have been no other games like it, because to make a game like Tempest, you cannot conceal your inspiration as it is so far removed from anything else - it is simply the only game of its genre.

Thus, we make no apologies for stating that Ultra is a total, respectful homage to this great game, Ultra is Tempest for the 21st century - with a dramatic, modern visual and audio makeover, and only enough gameplay differences to keep Atari's lawyers from our door.

Tempest is superbly sublime to play. Difficult at first, and seemingly way too fast on the later levels, it slowly grabs you and draws you in. Over time, you begin to bond with the machine and control your player without even thinking. To think is to slow your reaction times, and reaction times in Tempest are everything. To play it as a veteran, you enter a semi-altered state where you and the machine become one, and the enemies just get blown away. This is the essence of Tempest, it gives you an almost omnipotent power where you actually believe that your prowess in the game seems to outweigh your real ability. Tempest, makes video game savants of those who enter its abstract space. It's as if the machine empowers you and takes you beyond yourself - and very few games have ever managed to capture that since.

Ultra is a humble attempt to try and reproduce this feeling, and stands in submission to its forbear, yet shows the way this great game might well have been had it originally been written in this modern era.

Why is Ultra unique?
Abstract games, such as Ultra and Tempest, are relatively few and far between in the modern gaming world. Suspension of reality, in games like Doom 3, takes time, a lot of time. All that time goes into making you think that you are in a real situation performing real acts. Yet playing a game is about gaming, and there's no need to go to such inordinate lengths to produce a quality gaming experience - and this is where abstract games stand tall. Because producing the art resources in an abstract game is relatively simple and time efficient, much of the production time is instead spent on improving the gameplay rather than the visuals or the audio - something which almost inevitably produces a superior gaming experience. The game we've made here, was firmly developed with this philosophy.

Although gameplay is king in our development model, we decided that we also wanted to merge gaming into the demo scene with something akin to an abstract gaming demo. (If you're unfamiliar with the demo scene then see www.demoscene.tv for the lowdown). Therefore, although so far in the game's development we've concentrated mostly on how it plays and getting that just right, the direction is now turning to how it looks and improving the feel of the visuals that surround you - which brings us on to the unique way in which we want to progress the game ...

In Ultra, we plan to use a radical approach to the development - which is to continue to develop it beyond its release date, and for you to automatically get new releases as and when they appear. Ultra, is to be a game that just keeps on giving, way after you initially get hold of it. As a programmer in the games industry, it has always struck me that having to leave a game alone, only days after you manage to produce a viable releasable product, is a real crying shame. Indeed, most development teams are normally a couple of months into the development of their next game when their last one hits the shelves. There's just no time to enjoy or reflect upon your achievements.

A lot of people in the games industry are very creative, yet the commercial pressures of producing games are very high and creativity can often be stifled as a result. There is normally only a finite window of time where a developer producing a game can be creative, and after that time has passed it's all hands to the pump to get the game written on time for the publisher. Having time to revisit a game after this rush of activity to improve it or to try different ideas is often just a dream. This reality is quite different from the naive ideals I had when I entered the industry, and I thought it was about time that I was true to myself and actually write a game with real love, care and attention poured into it, and to give whatever time is needed to do that.

So Ultra is being written in my own time, on my own terms and isn't beholden to any developer or publisher constraints. In short, Ultra, is a labour of love.

Who are we?
We are two people. Firstly there is myself, the Code Monkey, aka Rob Baker. I'm writing all the code for the game, producing the graphics and the game's sound effects. Secondly, there is my friend, Loonie, aka Ben Ackerman, who is producing the music to accompany you while you play. We are doing this work in our own time as we both have professional jobs within the games industry and of course our paid-work has to come first. Between us, we have nearly twenty years experience in writing games so expect something really special in Ultra.