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On this day 20 years ago, Microsoft purchased Rare
- Thread starter daTRUballin
- Start date
MadchesterManc
Member
Viva Pinata is peak Rare for me, still awesome to play, and to be fair their early X360 stuff was good and wasn't till Kinect that they were dragged through the mud
PaintTinJr
Member
Despite the n64 being magnificent hardware (IMO) for Nintendo games, it was IMO a continued misstep from Nintendo walking away from the Sony pre-PlayStation CD hardware in many ways and may have contributed to Rare's top technical staff looking elsewhere - assuming that they were, around that time.
Nintendo's main reason for not going with Sony's CD solution was probably that they didn't see texture mapping as an important need for their main franchises, they saw loading times increase via CD - compared to cartridge - and the piracy risk - hence why the GC drive is non-standard reading in reverse order IIRC - and they probably viewed hardware accelerated z-buffering - which the n64 can do, but the PS1 can't - as more important, for them personally, than vastly more storage and texture mapping for realistic rendering that the PS1 exploited to the hilt. At a hardware level the N64 was out of sync with the market by it using a niche colour index method of texturing capability that is so niche and limited to tiny textures - it only has about two pages of coverage in the OpenGL red book of the time - and the publishing costs with carts, and limited data all because they hadn't gone the optical storage route probably meant they could never truly compete that gen.
The GC was the first console where Nintendo had embraced all the contemporary techniques and hardware that would have unlocked more of Rare's best technical staff's talents, so I see the GC lack of success as Nintendo's realisation they needed blue waters to sell to.
I guess it is also possible that with Rare and Microsoft UK quite closely situated it might have been through fear of losing those staff to Xbox UK anyway, and Rare then end up being worthless that led to the sale, or maybe fear of Rare staff exiting and leaking info to Xbox UK that could disadvantage Nintendo.
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JohnnyFootball
GerAlt-Right. Ciriously.
MS purchasing Rare was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Rare was one of the top developers and joining MS has made them into a mediocre. Tell me how great Sea of Thieves is all you want, I'll be happy to show you Conker, Banjo, Goldeneye and say "FUCK YOU"
Rare is the reason why anyone who thinks that MS buying all these studios is going to make Gamepass better needs a reality check. More than likely MS is going to ruin those studios like they did 343.
I certainly HOPE MS can make these studios great, but without major changes in leadership (Matt Booty) I don't see it happening.
If I end up being wrong, I'll be happy to admit it.
Rare is the reason why anyone who thinks that MS buying all these studios is going to make Gamepass better needs a reality check. More than likely MS is going to ruin those studios like they did 343.
I certainly HOPE MS can make these studios great, but without major changes in leadership (Matt Booty) I don't see it happening.
If I end up being wrong, I'll be happy to admit it.
PharaoTutAnchAmun
Member
A see a contradiction in your post.
First you say: the problem isn't MS.
Then you say MS should have payd to make sure key people didn't quit...
So infact it is kind off Microsofts fault.....
ResilientBanana
Member
loved Nuts and Bolts.
JLB
Banned
thanks for you recurrent and uninterested concern of all things microsoft, dear citizen.
The Fartist
Gold Member
Roberts
Member
I wish ND, with their tech expertise, could make something as unique and exciting as SoT.
TheGodfather07
Member
I often wonder what rare would be like if they were never acquired by Microsoft.
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BootsLoader
Banned
My deepest condolences, again.
Banjo64
cumsessed
I mean, they started making Grabbed by the Ghoulies immediately after wrapping up Banjo Tooie for the GameCube.
Grunty’s Revenge started development in 1999 (1 year before Tooie released).
Banjo Pilot was in development for 5 years and started when they were a ‘Nintendo studio’.
Star Fox Adventures was also in the pipeline for years prior to the MS buyout.
It’s easy to fall in to the trap of ‘MS ruined Rare’, but what they had in the pipeline prior to buyout was already terrible.
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6502
Member
So they have only one development team? In the N64 days they had a few teams working on different games at a time. If it is just one that is indeed a productive record.
daTRUballin
Member
I don't think that's really fair. Not that I blame MS solely for everything that's happened after the buyout. Things aren't so black and white, after all. But I legit think their immediate Xbox output suffered because of the buyout. Having to switch from GC to Xbox and then to 360 hurt a lot of these games for sure.
There's a chance that Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Kameo would've been much better games on the GC. Ghoulies actually was supposed to be a bigger and less linear platformer like the Banjo games before the buyout, but they had to make it very linear because they had to rush the game out for the Xbox.
Perfect Dark Zero turned out to be a mess on the Xbox 360, but could've turned out better without all the platform switching.
They had some good-looking stuff in the pipeline as well. I would kill to have seen what Donkey Kong Racing would've been like. The E3 2001 trailer looked cool. Viva Piñata was actually in development for the GC at one point with a different name and that game is always considered one of the high points of the MS era.
Not to mention a lot of other interesting things we potentially missed out on.
phil_t98
#SonyToo
Why would they be better games just by being on a different console? They created the games they wanted
Also Kameo was a decent game
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daTRUballin
Member
It depends what periods you're talking about. During the early years of the buyout (Grabbed by the Ghoulies to Nuts & Bolts) they had multiple teams like in the older days. During the Kinect days they seem to have switched to a one team structure. These days, I think they might have two teams at least considering one is still working on SoT and one is working on Everwild. They might even have a smaller third team.
daTRUballin
Member
Like I explained, the platform switching turned the development of these games into a mess. Not to mention having to get used to the way Microsoft ran things after being so used to the way the Stampers and Nintendo ran things before.
phil_t98
#SonyToo
Nintendo ownd a large minority in the company. Rare still called the shots. So yeah maybe they had to get used to Microsoft but they didn’t release bad games. They didn’t release great games but the review score were far from average.
jakinov
Member
The narrative that is usually spread around and what the person I'm replying to is saying is that Microsoft did this or that and that's why Rare sucks now. My point is that it's not Microsoft doing things to ruin the company but there are things Microsoft could have done. If you have a kid who flunks out of college, and people were falsely speculting that it was because their parents beat him or whatever; but then in reality the parents let their kid do their own thing and they just flunked out at their own volition. If I say it's not the parents fault they flunked out, it's not a contradiction for me to also say, in hindsight that there are things that they could have done to support them in a better direction.
