CrimsonCrescendo said:

Developer - Rare


From 1994 to 2002 they turned out 25 games, accumulated over 51 million sales, were at the forefront of the industry regarding tech, revolutionized multiplayer shooters on consoles, and to this day is considered one of the best developers of all time during this period. Notable games: Banjo Kazooie, Banjo Tooie, Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, Conker's Bad Fur Day, and so on.

From 2003 to 2008 they were a competent developer who still turned out flawed, but innovative titles. They turned out 11 games, but only garnered maybe 4 to 5 million sales from what I can find. Their market simply wasn't on Xbox. Notable games include Viva Pinata, Perfect Dark Zero, and Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts.

From 2009 to 2014 they were a Kinect company. They turned out 3 games, sold maybe five million (mostly from the first game) from what I can ascertain (I have no insider info, just published numbers available to everyone), and the last game was a major flop (again, no insider info... just info readily available on GAF). Low sales, low critical reception.

From 2015 onwards they've released a single game, a port collection of their old games. We're still waiting on Sea of Thieves.

Click to expand...

Leon S. Kennedy said:

It's been stated already, but I would say Atari. They had nearly 100% of the console market in 1980 and were also the only software publisher until some ex-employees formed Activision and started making games for the 2600. Now, Atari doesn't even exist.

Click to expand...

Tom Nook Sawyer said:

It's sad. Nintendo would have been SUNK without Rare saving their ass on the N64. It's a shame they didn't buy Rare out while they had the chance--even if just for the IPs (tho the talent was amazing too, but perhaps they were bleeding out by that point?)

Click to expand...

Lady Gaia said:

As I remember it, the Stamper brothers were planning to retire on the proceeds of the sale one way or another. I can only presume they were an important driving force in Rare alongside Nintendo's strong guidance. Presumably given their ongoing involvement Nintendo realized Rare's best years were coming to a close with the departure of Tim and Chris.

Click to expand...

http://www.develop-online.net/inter...tamper-on-the-past-present-and-future/0209651
...While Nintendo remained a strong and valuable partner for Rare, the Stampers had their sights set on bigger things. Change was in the air. "The price of software development was going up and up with the platforms, and Rare works really well with a partner," says Stamper. "We were looking for someone to help broaden our horizons." That someone turned out to be Microsoft, which [in 2002] forked out a whopping $375m to completely own the UK developer – at the time a new record for high-value acquisitions... In 2007, Tim and Chris Stamper made the shock announcement that they were leaving Rare – the studio they had nurtured for more than 20 years – to "pursue other opportunities"...

Click to expand...

TheDinoman said:

The whole "EVERYONE TALENTED LEFT RARE BEFORE THE BUYOUT!" thing has always bothered me because from what I understand, it was really only the Goldeneye/Perfect Dark team that suffered some fairly big losses, as mentioned above.

Lots of people don't seem to realize this, but Rare had multiple different teams working on different genres at once during the N64 era. Even if a lot of the GE/PD gang left, the other teams retained most of their key people: The Stamper Bros., Gregg Mayles, Chris Seavor, George Andreas, Chris Sutherland, Steve Mayles, Grant Kirkhope, etc. A lot of those people did leave Rare overtime, but they were still with the company even when it was purchased by Microsoft.

Click to expand...

http://web.archive.org/web/20110910...oshrine.com:80/theman/interviews/081403.shtml
OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE: We get the impression that Rare didn't work very closely with Nintendo to polish up its last few games, especially Starfox Adventures. 
MIYAMOTO: Rare is a rather independent company and it has the capacity to work independently. In the case of the original DKC, because I was concerned about the outcome, I was checking and putting in comments myself, especially during the last few months. At the very beginning, my personal involvement was ten percent. This lessened as the sequels went on, but of course other people at Nintendo were always involved. The total involvement was always around ten per cent and this was mainly from my people. 
ONM: Starfox Adventures just didn't feel like a Nintendo game; it didn't feel like you had your hands on it at all, much less than ten percent. 
MIYAMOTO: Almost everything was done by Rare, except we specifically advised the use of the control stick. 
ONM: You didn't tell them, for example, to get rid of the 100 or 200 stupid things you had to collect in every single level? 
MIYAMOTO: [laughs] That was a little bit extreme, yes. But, in general, they were good. I'd like to emphasize that our separation from Rare wasn't due to creative differences. It was financial.

Click to expand...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-08-who-killed-rare
"The company was on the market for several years, two years certainly, and this was driven by the majority owners Tim, Chris and Joel Hochberg," says Hollis. "The majority of middle management were enthusiastic followers of the idea but I always felt uncomfortable. EA, Activision, Disney and obviously Nintendo were all mooted. In the end I understand Mr Yamauchi [Nintendo's President] declined to offer more than a fraction of the value Rare was asking; shrewdly, it would seem. Meanwhile Microsoft had a strategic reason to buy, two reasons really: firstly so Nintendo would not have Rare's games, and secondly so that Microsoft would."

Click to expand...

http://www.develop-online.net/inter...tamper-on-the-past-present-and-future/0209651
...While Nintendo remained a strong and valuable partner for Rare, the Stampers had their sights set on bigger things. Change was in the air. "The price of software development was going up and up with the platforms, and Rare works really well with a partner," says Stamper. "We were looking for someone to help broaden our horizons." That someone turned out to be Microsoft, which forked out a whopping $375m to completely own the UK developer – at the time a new record for high-value acquisitions...

Click to expand...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-04-free-radical-vs-the-monsters
...Free Radical Design was founded by key members of the Rare team that made GoldenEye. Released on N64 in August 1997, it was the first classic console shooter and sold a stunning eight million copies. "I think at the time we naively believed we did everything ourselves," laughs Free Radical co-founder Steve Ellis. "We were kind of a company within a company in Rare and credited ourselves for the success of GoldenEye, without really acknowledging that many other people played a part in that." Dissatisfied with their meagre share of GoldenEye's profits, the team had nevertheless started work on successor Perfect Dark before, in late 1998, David Doak handed in his notice and set off a chain reaction...

Click to expand...

http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/07/28/ign-presents-the-history-of-rare?page=5
...Publicly, Rare was on a roll. Behind the scenes, employee turnover bordered on disastrous. In the few interviews they granted, Tim and Chris Stamper came across as quiet, unassuming Englishmen, but the pace they maintained and the demands they set could grate at closer range. Their longtime partners at Zippo Games, the Pickfords, left shortly after the Stampers bought them out in the 80's and deep-sixed a favored wrestling game. By the N64 years, their tiny company had grown from the low teens to several hundred, but the Stampers kept their hands firmly in every project, and that management style didn't sit well with everyone. The first public defection happened in 1997, when a group of employees marched out en masse to form Eighth Wonder, a studio dedicated to developing for Sony. Well into the three-year production cycle for a successor to GoldenEye 007, Hollis and Doak decided they'd had their fill as well, taking much of their production teams with them...

Click to expand...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-08-who-killed-rare
Simon Parkin (Feb 2012)
..."The changes [by Microsoft] were imperceptible at first, but became increasingly rapid as time went on," says Phil Tossell. Hired by Hollis in 1997, he cut his teeth on Diddy Kong Racing before working as lead engineer on Dinosaur Planet (which later became Starfox Adventures). He was present at the company through the Microsoft acquisition, and was promoted to Director of Gameplay in 2009 when he oversaw development of Kinect Sports. "For me personally, the atmosphere became much more stifling and a lot more stressful," he says. "There was an overall feeling that you weren't really in control of what you were doing and that you weren't really trusted either."

"There was also a gradual introduction of certain Microsoft behaviours that crept into the way we did things: lots more meetings, performance reviews and far more regard for your position within the company," he said. "While these weren't necessarily good or bad per se, they began to erode the traditional Rare culture and way of doing things. Many of the people who'd been there a long time found these changes extremely hard to accept."

Click to expand...

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...amoto-gamecity?CMP=twt_a-technology_b-gdntech
Keith Stuart and Jordan Erica Webber (Oct 2015)
...But it's not just the players. [Martin] Hollis argues that Nintendo also respects the creators, even when it might be financially detrimental. Apparently, Rare was asked if it would consider making a game based on the next James Bond film, but the studio turned it down. "I thought about this and was not sure I'd really want to," said Hollis. "We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No'. We sent the message back, ‘The answer is no. We don't plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film'. And that was it." Years later, Hollis still seems surprised at how easily Nintendo accepted their refusal. "It must have grossed, I don't know, $400m or something. You might've thought that on a commercial basis someone at Nintendo, even lower down or higher up or whatever, would've said, 'Well, are you sure?', but out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it."

Click to expand...

Schopenhauerian said:

Note that Tim and Chris Stamper actually left in 2007, 5 years after the purchase by MS. Of course, from 2002-2007, in contrast to their time with Nintendo, the Stampers were no longer the majority shareholders (MS owned Rare outright):


As TheDinoman mentioned in another thread, it's notable that there were a lot of folks still at Rare, at the time of the purchase by MS:


And while Miyamoto’s praise for Rare in Sept 2003 ("...in general they were good...") is clearly less glowing than his highly laudatory comments about Rare from 2000 and earlier (see here and here) -- perhaps reflecting the (widely perceived) relative drop in quality of their output -- even in Sept 2003, it's notable that Miyamoto went out of his way to emphasize the following point: "...I'd like to emphasize that our separation from Rare wasn't due to creative differences. It was financial."


Miyamoto: "...It was financial…" That gets to what was perhaps the main issue:




The idea that the Stampers were 'financially ambitious' seems to come up in multiple accounts:




On the subject of the changes that took place under Microsoft (with Tim and Chris no longer the majority shareholders), Tossell and Hollis's accounts are possibly of interest:

Click to expand...

Rambler said:

what do they even do these days

Click to expand...

LizardKing said:

Yeah this. Surprised there aren't more of this opinion. Square was god tier back in the day. Now mediocre at best.

Click to expand...

Neptonic said:

Anyone who says anything other Konami is lying to themselves

Click to expand...

Neptonic said:

Anyone who says anything other Konami is lying to themselves

Click to expand...

Lady Gaia said:

It's true, and very sad. Given the number of responses to my post on Brøderbund (that would be zero) I guess most of the NeoGAF audience is simply too young to remember the dominant early developers and publishers.

Click to expand...

daTRUballin said:

Wow. Very interesting stuff. Thanks for this!

It's also really weird seeing Miyamoto (or anyone from Nintendo, really) talk about Rare after the buyout. I've always wondered what he thinks of them and their games now......

Click to expand...

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2012/12/feature_the_making_of_star_fox_adventures
Feature: The Making Of Star Fox Adventures
By Damien McFerran at Nintendo Life
Dec 26, 2012

...With the Star Fox branding established, Tossell and the rest of the team worked tirelessly on the game with surprisingly little interference from Nintendo. "On the whole we worked very independently," explains Tossell. "We had an initial trip to Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto for about a week where we discussed the changes that would be required to make the game fit in well with the Star Fox universe. Sitting in a room discussing gameplay ideas with Miyamoto-san is certainly one of the highlights of my career and I still have his business card carefully stored away. I also remember going to an Italian restaurant for lunch near to the offices with Miyamoto-san and talking about all sorts of things. I'm not one to get starstruck, but that's probably the one time in my life where I felt a little bit overawed. We also met with Takaya Imamura, who is the creative mind behind Star Fox originally. Imamura-san came to stay at Rare for around a month I think, where he would work with Lee Schuneman overseeing what we were doing. I think on the whole though, Nintendo was really trusting of our ability to make a great game."

Working under Nintendo was an eye-opening experience for Tossell, who is full of praise for the Japanese company. "Without doubt of all the time I've worked in the industry it was the most trusting and respectful relationship," he says. "Of course, it helped because technically Rare was independent - Nintendo only owned 49% of the company, as far as I am aware. This meant that the Stamper Brothers [Rare's founders] didn't have to do anything they didn't want to. This contrasts sharply with how it is now where Microsoft owns the whole company. Even accounting for that though, Nintendo knows games - its knows them inside and out and knows when something needs to be pushed and prodded and when it doesn't. And [Nintendo] understands that if you push and prod too much then you destroy any spark that a game may have. It's a delicate balancing act that Nintendo made look easy."

...To make the process even more demanding, there was also the small matter of Microsoft buying Rare mid-way through the game's development. "The Stampers were very open about the situation, at least as much as they could be," explains Tossell. "I think for me it was a blessing to be working on Star Fox Adventures, because we still had a clear deadline for completion of the game and knew we had to get it done before any sale occurred; other parts of the company struggled for focus around that time because of all the uncertainty. So from our perspective it really just spurred us on to get Star Fox Adventures finished."

...Tossell would go on to assume the role of Director of Gameplay and Human–computer Interaction at Rare and work on projects such as Kameo and Kinect Sports, but left the company in 2010 to start up his own studio with two other ex-Rare employees... what does he think about the perception that his former employer has lost its way in recent years? There's a pause. "It's difficult to answer this," he eventually replies. "In many ways, for me, Rare doesn't exist any more. That is the Rare that I knew and loved and that I got up every morning like an excited child to go to work for. The Rare that I spent far too many hours at and yet never resented one bit. The Rare where all my friends were, most of whom are no longer there. And so that Rare doesn't exist any more. The Rare that does exist is a new Rare, an evolved Rare with different goals and different aims, and I think and hope that they will go on and continue to thrive in their own way. Kinect Sports was my final game at Rare and if you look past the kind of game it is, it still bears all the hallmarks of a quality, polished game that Rare was known for. I look forward to seeing what they do next."

Click to expand...

http://money.cnn.com/2002/09/20/news/deals/rare/
By Staff Writer Chris Morris
September 20, 2002

CNN/Money has learned that Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft has purchased Rare Ltd., the development house behind such titles as Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye and the upcoming Star Fox Adventures. Nintendo previously held a 49 percent interest in Rare, but announced it had sold that ownership position Friday. "We sold our position back to Rare and then they sold the entire company to Microsoft," said George Harrison, senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications for Nintendo of America...

Nintendo, which declined to discuss the sale price of its share of Rare, had an option to purchase the rest of the developer last fall, but decided against it, believing that the price was too high. "Nintendo had the ability to continue its exclusive relationship with Rare, but in looking at the company's recent track record, it became clear that its value to the future of Nintendo would be limited," said Peter MacDougall, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America. "In other words, we passed on this opportunity for very good business reasons."

Click to expand...

RawkHawk2010 said:

...it was Gregg Mayles (the director of DKC, Banjo, etc. and needless to say one of the most renowned veterans of the company) who decided to make Banjo-Kazooie a vehicular platformer. Not some recently-hired nobody, not some Microsoft executive - it was the fucking creator of the series... Similarly, it was Chris Seavor who wanted to put more emphasis on Conker: Live & Reloaded's lame It's War!-inspired multiplayer than the remake itself. (I think I even remember reading a Scribes where he said the game should have focused solely on the multiplayer so it could have had more maps.)... these developers just got bored of their franchises and did whatever would make them interested in working with them again, but neglected the actual audience in the process... anyone but Gregg Mayles would have been hesitant (aka scared to death) to make such rash and eccentric decisions...

Click to expand...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-22-the-man-who-made-conker-rares-most-adult-game
By Wesley Yin-Poole
Oct 12, 2014

Chris Seavor left Rare in January 2011 after 17 years at the legendary UK developer... he's best known for taking the cute Twelve Tales: Conker 64 and turning it into the profanity and poo packed N64 adventure Conker's Bad Fur Day... After the studio he so loved was bought by Microsoft he remade Conker's Bad Fur day for the Xbox. Conker: Live & Reloaded launched in 2005 with dumbed down content and Live-enabled multiplayer... After that, Seavor headed up multiple Xbox 360 projects that never saw the light of day... Conker 2, Perfect Dark Core, Ordinary Joe and Urchin, among others. He saw Kameo 2, a motion control game called Savannah and more fall by the wayside...

Chris Seavor: [Microsoft] sacked a load of artists, and I was among them. Well, redundancies I guess you could call it. It was quite a lot in one go, for whatever reason, which I'm still not even clear about. This was January 2011... I came to Rare in the beginning of 1994 straight from college, and I was straight in at the deep end onto Killer Instinct, which was not called that at the time. It was in the first month of getting the gig. Donkey Kong was halfway done... [In the old days] It was a trial by fire. But it was really good times. Rare was a family business - very much so at the time. Not like it is now. Tim and Chris (Stamper) and the whole family, you were included in that family. It sounds a bit creepy but it was actually quite good. You were part of their family. Tim's mum used to cook us lunch. Tim's dad always used to do stuff for us. It was good. It was like a really tight unit in the first couple of years I was there, and then it started to expand. Donkey Kong, then Killer Instinct, then it just absolutely exploded as a company. That's when it really grew and lost its intimacy...

Chris Seavor: There are some bits in [Conker's Bad Fur Day - 2001] where I look back now and I go, oh god, I don't know how we got away with that. I think Live & Reloaded [2005] was more dumbed down than the original Nintendo one, which is ironic... I started designing [Conker 2] and we were going to do it. They just wanted it quickly. It was coming to the end of the life cycle of the Xbox, and there was talk of them going, look, can we just shift this over to the 360, which was a year away? I was really against that because I just couldn't face spending another two years on a game we'd already spent a year and a half on. So I guess it was probably my fault... From the amount of messages I get every day saying please make Conker 2 I'd say it would have been a better move [to make Conker 2 instead of Live & Reloaded]... We probably spread our butter too thin. We had three quite big teams that weren't quite big enough. It was getting to the point where games needed massive teams. We probably had a massive team's worth of game, but we didn't realise that was what we needed to do. That was what eventually happened with Banjo [Nuts & Bolts from 2008]. It was just all hands on that and it was still tight to get it done, just because the graphics were a ridiculous amount of work... I had a good time at Rare. I got out at the right time, that's for sure. And I'm really enjoying what I'm doing now because I'm on my own. I don't have to have these meetings with people where you go in and you go, oh god I'm going to be a slave to someone else's lack of vision here. I had some tense meetings over the years, that's for sure...

Wesley Yin-Poole: Did you ever get into full-blown shouting matches with others?

Chris Seavor: Yeah, I did. I was a bit known for that if I'm honest. There have been a few doors slammed. It didn't happen too much in the old days with Tim and Chris. It was more intimate back then. You could talk to them. I wouldn't say they were friends, but they were people you felt comfortable with. Later on it was very much a hierarchy. I don't know if that's a good thing. I guess you don't have much of a choice if you're a bigger company. It was very much us and them sometimes. And I can get quite passionate, which gets mistaken for being troublesome, which I don't think helped my cause in the end. I mellowed out towards the end anyway. I was like, yeah, whatever. If you want to do that, that's fine. Just give me something to do. Get me to five o'clock so I can go home, which would have been unheard of back in the day. I was there till 11 or 12 most nights for the first five or six years at the company, because I enjoyed it so much...

Click to expand...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-08-who-killed-rare
By Simon Parkin
Feb 8, 2012

Through a locked gate, down a winding path and by a still pond a few miles outside of the leafy village of Twycross, England, a bonsai tree stands. It was a gift given to Rare by Shigeru Miyamoto, the most famous game designer in the world, as a thank-you for the game developer's critical and commercial success in creating games for Nintendo, the most famous game maker in the world...

"That's not to say that it was easy," says [Phil] Tossell. "The hours were long and the environment was very competitive: not in the sense of team members competing with each other, but competition between teams. I think this was a deliberate ploy by Tim and Chris to push each team further and harder... The old site was a converted farmhouse and by the time I joined [in 1996] there were already around 100 staff and fitting all the cars in was literally like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Each team was in a separate barn and their access key only worked on their barn... Work always began at 9 on the dot. Lunch was just 30 minutes and then it was back to work. Most days I would work until around 10pm, but it really depended on what you were doing at the time. It wasn't unusual to do 60 or more hours' overtime a week."

...However, in time it became clear that everyone had underestimated how much of the studio's success was down to Nintendo's gentle steering. "It seemed like Microsoft was really a novice in the games industry and for some time they left us to try and see how things worked," Cook explains. "They wanted hit games for their console and since they weren't sure how to go about it they trusted Rare to do what was necessary. The problem here was that Rare was a very long way from the very corporate structure of Microsoft and when Rare had made games it wasn't in isolation from Nintendo but as a creative partnership... The kind of support that Nintendo offered wasn't available at Microsoft because Microsoft hadn't the experience..."

Two years after the acquisition, the announcement came that the Stamper brothers were leaving the company to explore new ventures. While Fries is uncertain as to whether this had anything to do with Microsoft's changes to the studio ("I don't know why they chose to leave or if it had anything to do with how they were treated by Microsoft after I left") Hollis is sure that it was a significant contributor to their decision. "On a human psychology and organisational motivation side level, the money-based motivation of bonuses shrivelled as games became increasingly competitive... Meanwhile, Rare's games became unsuccessful. The other money-based motivation of shares was a one-shot. Once it paid off I guess Chris and Tim lost all interest and energy, effectively sitting out their stipulated term. This passivity percolated down through the whole company."

Click to expand...

Steez said:

I envy those who say Bioware and cite ME as their greatest series. Imagine how much it sucks for those who were around for Baldur's Gate 2.

Click to expand...

Psychoward said:

Mass Effect 1 and 2 and Dragon Age Origins are better games than Jade Empire and KOTOR 1 could ever dream to be.

Click to expand...

billy beane said:

lol nah but nice try. And I love Mass Effect.

Click to expand...

Ray Down said:

Publisher: Konami

Developer: Rare

Click to expand...

Steez said:

I envy those who say Bioware and cite ME as their greatest series. Imagine how much it sucks for those who were around for Baldur's Gate 2.

Click to expand...

StereoVsn said:

Bioware is my pick as well. BG2 was certainly their Magnum Opus (and one of my favorite games of all times) but at least they had enjoyable games in Kotor, Jade Empire, DAO, ME1/2 till things went to shit with ME3, SWTOR, DA2, DAI, and finally the latest and the worst of them all, MEA.

They went from games that were a buy with no questions to "maybe later for $20 or less".

Click to expand...