axisofweevils
Holy crap! Today's real megaton is that more than two people can have the same first name.
Emily Rogers interviewed three veteran Rare/Free Radical employees who formed a company called Crash Lab: Steve Ellis, Martin Wakeley, and Lee Musgrave.
http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2012/10/01/crash-lab-life-after-rareware-and-free-radical/
A lot of interesting stuff here:
DK Racing:
Rare thought MS would make a handheld:
Timesplitters 2 HD was in development:
Killer Instinct licensing issues:
http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2012/10/01/crash-lab-life-after-rareware-and-free-radical/
A lot of interesting stuff here:
DK Racing:
Donkey Kong Racing was obviously pretty heavily tied to Nintendo as a franchise, and as Rare approached the finalization of a buyout deal with Microsoft it was clear that the game had no future, at least with the apes as characters. We switched it around to be a Sabreman game, and there was a great early Xbox prototype but someone, somewhere decreed that it was a little too old-school for the kind of revolutionary gaming experiences that the Xbox was capable of delivering, and so it started down a path of meandering changes, updates and evolution that finally saw it run out of steam and fall over.
Rare thought MS would make a handheld:
Over the years Rare had assembled a great hand-held department, and it was decided that wed keep it when Microsoft took over even though they didnt have a handheld console of their own. The thought was that maybe, one day there would be a Microsoft handheld device and wed need the development experience of the team. We continued to release games on DS for a while but eventually we just needed all the resources we could find to help build Xbox and X360 games, and so with no Windows Mobile or Windows Phone on the horizon at the time, it fizzled out.
Timesplitters 2 HD was in development:
We had a HD downloadable version of TimeSplitters 2 in development at Free Radical in 2008. I dont know what happened to that but yes, Id love to see it released at some point. Maybe it could be the catalyst that is required in order to raise enough interest in TimeSplitters 4 that a publisher might want to fund it.
Killer Instinct licensing issues:
We came close to firing off a conversion of Killer Instinct a few times, but there were licensing obstacles to that, and it never really had enough perceived interest to push it forwards. Oh, and of course, there was Goldene . . .