Games - Rare

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Rare Ltd. is a UK-based video game development company. It was founded in 1982 by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper. Rare was a second-party developer for the Nintendo gaming platforms for several years, but in 2002 was acquired by Microsoft (see GYM (technology)). In fall 2003, the company's "Rareware" logo (which had been used since 1994) was discontinued and was replaced by a newer, similar logo with the name "Rare".

The company is notable for having created an unusually large number of original hit games, and for the company's price tag: Microsoft paid US$377 million for the company, a record for a video game developer.

Formed as Ashby Computer Graphics (ACG), the company developed games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro as "Ultimate: Play the Game" until the name was sold to U.S. Gold in 1985.

Company overview

Rare is located in Twycross, England and is the company behind many of the most famous games for Nintendo's various gaming systems: Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country (and its sequels), Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Diddy Kong Racing, Donkey Kong 64, Jet Force Gemini, and Star Fox Adventures.

Its games have always employed some of the latest graphics technology. One of its most critically acclaimed and popular series was the Donkey Kong Country series on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, due to its use of pre-rendered 3D graphics on a 2D console. GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 is considered by many to be their biggest success, known even today as one of the gold standards for console first-person shooters, eventually selling over eight million copies. Rareware's Killer Instinct added several features to the fighting game genre such as autodouble combos, combo linkers and ultra combos.

Key members of the GoldenEye development team left Rare soon after beginning work on Perfect Dark. Head of Software Martin Hollis was the first to leave in 1998, working at Nintendo of America on the GameCube, and in 2000 he started his own company, Zoonami. Other members such as David Doak left soon after he did and formed Free Radical Design.

However prior to both of these events, Rare had already publicly lost staff from other teams. In 1997 a small number of employees (Oliver Davies, Oliver Norton, Steve Patrick, Jeff Stafford, Christopher Gage, and Adrian Smith) left and formed a new studio to be known as Eighth Wonder. They were signed with SCEE (who made sure this defection was well publicised in the games press) and were all set to develop a new PlayStation title. There were high hopes that this would produce an amazing game; provisionally titled "Popcorn". EDGE magazine even profiled the project, showing a game that looked like a 3D version of Bomberman. However, despite being shown by SCEE at the 1998 ECTS , the game and the studio seemed to disappear as the months went by. Eighth Wonder no longer exists and there are no confirmed reports of the game ever being released, thus making it likely that SCEE ended up cancelling the project in a very quiet fashion.

Up from the end of 2000 people from Activision and Microsoft visited Rare. In November 2001, Microsoft trademarked the name It's Mr. Pants, the name of a game which was released three years later. In September 2002, the Stamper brothers sold their 51% interest in Rare to Microsoft; following this, Nintendo sold their 49% stake in the company as well. Microsoft paid a total of $377 million for the company. Because of this, Rare is now a first-party developer for Microsoft's Xbox and its successors. The trademarks of the characters from the games that Rare made for Nintendo consoles (such as Conker of Conker's Bad Fur Day) were retained by Rare (apart from IP originally developed by Nintendo, i.e. Donkey Kong and Star Fox). Despite the acquisition, Rare still develops games for Game Boy Advance, and is now also developing for the Nintendo DS. Rare has never developed for Sony platforms.

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Games - Rare

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