In the mid-1980s Nintendo claimed its Famicom was impossible to reverse-engineer without proprietary documentation. British brothers Tim and Chris Stamper stripped the casings off its chips, mapped the circuitry by eye, cracked it, flew to Nintendo of America, and dropped working tech demos on the president's desk. Instead of a lawsuit, they got a virtually unlimited budget. This episode treats Rare Limited as a living biography, from its founding in 1985 in a Twycross farmhouse through 60 games in five years, including Slalom, RC Pro-Am, and Battletoads, built as a war chest for the coming 16-bit transition.

Rare spent that war chest on Silicon Graphics workstations, the same machines that rendered Jurassic Park, and invented Advanced Computer Modeling to turn pre-rendered 3D into SNES sprites. A boxing demo convinced Nintendo to buy a 25  ...