Who on earth are they? You might well ask. Well, if we said GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and Jet Force Gemini you might get a better idea, as these two brothers are the driving force behind leviathan N64 coders Rare. Their story starts back in the '70s...

Chris and Tim Stamper first got involved in coding in the late '70s from their home in sleepy Ashby de la Zouch by converting Space Invaders arcade boards. During the early '80s the brothers (Tim is the younger of the two, by the way) took their skills to the new Sinclair Spectrums and in 1982 set up Ultimate - Play The Game, a trading name for Ashby Computer Graphics (the fabled ACG of games such as Atic Atac). Ultimate went on to create some of the best, and best-selling, Spectrum games ever, like Jetpac, Underwurlde, Sabre Wulf, Lunar Jetman and Knight Lore.

Come the mid '80s the Spectrum was dying and Sega's Master System and Nintendo's NES were starting to make waves, so the Stamper's looked closely at the machines and plumped to devote their coding efforts to Nintendo's 8bit console. They abandoned the Ultimate name and set themselves up as Rare, going on to produce some 60 titles for the machine, including Slalom, Marble Madness and Battletoads.

During the early '90s Rare moved across to the new SNES, and rather than simply upgrade and re-hash their earlier titles, Rare's output was noticeably reduced. This was a strategic decision to concentrate their efforts on new, original titles that pushed the machine to its limits. This was evident with the release of Donkey Kong Country, a game that went on to be a massive seller. Nintendo were so impressed with the UK outfit at this time that they bought a 25% stake in the firm, the first time they'd ever gone into fiscal partnership with a company outside Japan.

Rare continued to develop SNES games and inevitably moved to working with the N64, the fruits of their labours appearing in the form of Blast Corps, GoldenEye 007 and Diddy Kong Racing. The company continued their success with releases like Banjo Kazooie and are currently working on the mouth-watering Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo Tooie. Whether these games go on to be as successful as their predecessors remains to be seen. Who are we trying to kid? They're going to be phenomenal sellers because one thing Chris and Tim Stamper have never lost sight of is gameplay. Long may they continue.