[The Rare Canceled Game Art Thread]

A: Reasons unspecified: we can’t possibly create every sequel and remake and XBLA port that people bawl at us to make on a daily basis, and when it comes down to it, Kinect Sports has proven more popular than anything else we’ve done in recent years. So while we never rule out returning to action-adventure or any other genre, we also have to a) be able to afford junkfood and alcopops and b) satisfy an active audience of more than three million people who now know Rare best for Kinect Sports.
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I hope Rare doesn't really believe they've now captured a new audience. The people who play Kinect Sports don't care about the people who actually created the game. If Microsoft hands over the franchise to a shovelware developer to save money, Rare's active audience of more than three million people won't blink an eye. In fact, this should be highly worrisome for Rare because their studio can be closed down any minute, because they don't serve any purpose for MS now. They're utterly replacable right now. Do they really think no one else in the world can create casual sports games featuring avatars like they do?
 
ymmv said:
I hope Rare doesn't really believe they've now captured a new audience. The people who play Kinect Sports don't care about the people who actually created the game. If Microsoft hands over the franchise to a shovelware developer to save money, Rare's active audience of more than three million people won't blink an eye. In fact, this should be highly worrisome for Rare because their studio can be closed down any minute, because they don't serve any purpose for MS now. They're utterly replacable right now. Do they really think no one else in the world can create casual sports games featuring avatars like they do?
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Have you played Kinect Sports? Because it still feels very much like a Rare game, not like your typical generic sports casual game like with Nintendo or Sony. The Rare charm is there.
 
Rad- said:
Have you played Kinect Sports? Because it still feels very much like a Rare game, not like your typical generic sports casual game like with Nintendo or Sony. The Rare charm is there.
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Even some key guys behind Kinect Sports left after the DLC was released so it remains to be seen if the 'Rare charm' is found in Season 2.
ymmv said:
I hope Rare doesn't really believe they've now captured a new audience. The people who play Kinect Sports don't care about the people who actually created the game. If Microsoft hands over the franchise to a shovelware developer to save money, Rare's active audience of more than three million people won't blink an eye. In fact, this should be highly worrisome for Rare because their studio can be closed down any minute, because they don't serve any purpose for MS now. They're utterly replacable right now. Do they really think no one else in the world can create casual sports games featuring avatars like they do?
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Microsoft has already put BigPark on Kinect Sports: Season 2. I'm sure Microsoft will go with just BigPark for Season 3 down the road. Still we should wait for GamesCom to see if they pull something out of their hat, there were some non-cancelled prototypes floating around.

But yeah once MGS Vancouver and 343 start to deliver Microsoft won't keep Rare around anymore. There's no reason for Microsoft to maintain both the studio at Fazeley and the really nice offices at Twycross for just Kinect Sports. Once Kinect Fit and the likes were shut down it was pretty much clear to most of the staff that the studio wouldn't survive another year. So I don't think anyone would be surprised if they shut it down after Season 2 is out and BigPark learned their tricks. I also don't think Season 2 will do as well as Kinect Sports, especially considering MS is putting their marketing muscle behind Star Wars and Disney Adventures. Rare is completely fucked in that sense.
 
MaddenNFL64 said:
Loved Rare. Nostalgic thinking of all the fun I had back in the day, up to the gamecube era. I really did like Starfox Adventures. It was a beautiful game.

Hell, I kinda even sorta liked Perfect Dark Zero.
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It''s kinda crazy thinking back some of the old memories tied to Rare; co-op Battletoads was a massive highlight, my friend glowing over DKC for the first time (I was never a huge fan of the series for some obscure reason though that never stopped me from watching him play), or the amount of hours I plunged into GoldenEye where cheats were only rewarded to those with skill, and I still recall fooling around in Banjo Kazooie thinking "this is the best water I've ever seen in a game, it makes me want to drink it." Playing Conker's Bad Fur Day and Jet Force Gemini for their respective first times were also big highlights.

And damn what anyone else says - Diddy Kong Racing was vastly superior to Mario Kart 64.


I wasn't as dedicated as others have been and still are, but they made some incredible games.
 
Rare said:
Reasons unspecified: we can’t possibly create every sequel and remake and XBLA port that people bawl at us to make on a daily basis, and when it comes down to it, Kinect Sports has proven more popular than anything else we’ve done in recent years.
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You can't pull the "we can't make every..." card when you haven't made ANYTHING along those lines. You also can't say Kinect Sports has been more popular than anything else you've made in recent years as if it means something, when Kinect Sports is the ONLY thing you've made in recent years.

I really feel bad for Leigh Loveday. He has to spout off this crap which I'm sure he doesn't believe in (no sane person would, especially somebody who worked at Rare during their glory days), because it's his job to make them look good.
 
GreggTheGrimReaper said:
So we will probably never get another Killer Instinct or Conker? I thought that now with the resurrection of the classic fighting genre a new KI would be highly possible.
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KI... well there's a 0.00000001% chance. Conker? No way, Chris Seavor left.
 
GreggTheGrimReaper said:
So we will probably never get another Killer Instinct or Conker? I thought that now with the resurrection of the classic fighting genre a new KI would be highly possible.
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Literally nobody from KI Gold/KI is left:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/n64/killer-instinct-gold/credits
Robin Beanland for sound, Chris Sutherland as a character voice, Simon Farmer as a motion capture actor. What about Mark Betteridge? He rots in Microsoft hell.
 
[QUOTE='[Nintex]'there were some non-cancelled prototypes floating around.
[/QUOTE]

Wait what?



Also for GamesCom: Microsoft just finished booking me up for this year, and Rare meeting was not a part of it.
 
Rad- said:
Have you played Kinect Sports? Because it still feels very much like a Rare game, not like your typical generic sports casual game like with Nintendo or Sony. The Rare charm is there.
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Now if only it was as successful as Wii Sports.

What many on GAF fail to understand is that you can't just have shovelware developers match or come close to matching minigame collections like Wii Sports and Kinect Sports and have them play well AND be successful in the long run.

There needs to be SOME level of talent in place to make the game work, and there are a metric shitton of examples on the Wii of minigame collections being absolute crap as a result of their developer. Despite the (not-so-)recent suction of talent out of Rare, there is still talent there. Otherwise Kinect Sports would've sucked.
 
Is the KI IP still belong to Microsoft? I'm assuming so, since they aren't going to use how about handing it over to Nether Realms? They could actually, yanno, use the shit.
 
ToyMachine228 said:
I've kind of been tempted to buy Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts lately for some reason. Not really sure why.
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You should buy it, its a great game, even if its not a traditional Banjo-Kazooie game.
 
zeelman said:
You should buy it, its a great game, even if its not a traditional Banjo-Kazooie game.
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Yeah, he should go for it. I hated the concept at first but after picking it up last year for cheap I was blown away. Very fun game with a lot of classic Rare humor.
 
OMG Urchin looks fucking badddddasss! And no hope for Kameo 2? And a modern Kaemo with jailbait, reeeally? I hate you Microsoft.

I can't believe how horribly you've fucked/destroyed some of the most beloved studios of the 80s and 90s and then blamed THEM for the corporate memo fuckery you caused. Fuck MS.

*goes back to his GFWL game*
 
Zaraki_Kenpachi said:
There will never be another Kameo right? I really enjoyed that game when I bought my 360. :(
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I'm sure there'll be a Kameo rail shooter for Kinect for you and your whole family to enjoy!
 
That's really disappointing, maybe it was because it was the first 360 game I played but I loved that game so much. Looked and played so well. I'll miss that game. :(
 
Zaraki_Kenpachi said:
That's really disappointing, maybe it was because it was the first 360 game I played but I loved that game so much. Looked and played so well. I'll miss that game. :(
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Don't worry, you'll get Kinect Sports: London 2012 Edition instead ;)
 
Shiggy said:
Don't worry, you'll get Kinect Sports: London 2012 Edition instead ;)
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Thats totally going to happen right?


Does anyone has any insight on the other Kinect prototypes that were discussed a bit earlier on this page?
 
Shiggy said:
Honestly, it's probably something like this:

allcockfnnl.jpg
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Hahahaha oh man that made me laugh so hard.

Used to be good friends with Chris Allcock. At one point years ago I was debating moving to Twycross to take a job at Rare. Really glad I didn't now. Reading some of the quotes from ex-employees is heartbreaking. :(
 
Incredibly depressing.

It's sad to see not only Rare become like this but all the other great UK companies vanishing.
 
IOnEI Falcon said:
For the 3 million fans, he probably gets just as many berating him with questions on Banjo, Blast Corps, Perfect Dark and Kameo...
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Recently someone tweeted this:
Ex-YS reader/writer Leigh Loveday is *still* at RARE?! Impressive. Following @RareLtd is strange for an outsider like me, though!
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To which Leigh responded:
@YourSinclairRRY Still hanging on in there, still living the dream with a stupid letters page: http://t.co/g0O3dIB Speccy reference!
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Dr_Peace said:
They released 11 games on the N64 all of which were great if not incredible, far more than the output of any other studio even Nintendo's internal development teams.
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EAD developed Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64, Yoshi's Story, Star Fox 64, 1080 Snowboarding, F-Zero X, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Pokemon Stadium 1, Pokemon Stadium 2, Pokemon Stadium 3, and Animal Forest. They also co-developed Pilotwings 64. Which gives them about 13-14 games on the N64. Then EAD also developed 4 games for the 64DD.

They made some of the best looking games on the N64.
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On screen-shots sure. But they started sacrificing frame-rate without abandon.

There will NEVER be another developer like Rare, not ever. As much as I love Retro Studios they will never match what Rare were capable of.
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I love Perfect Dark. But we saw what RARE was capable of with Grabbed By The Ghoulies, Perfect Dark Zero, and Kameo. They were ok games but clearly the creative direction of the company was changing far before the Kinect virus.
 
Karting prototype:
tornadoracetrackiuau.jpg

carnitownkujz.jpg

lookfeel2gump.jpg


For being a prototype, it looked pretty good. Might've been the Banjo-Kazoomie prototype, but could've been a different one too.
 
Woah that looks great very inspirational. But seeing those kids in the rollercoaster my guess is that it wasn't the Banjo Kart game.

Still this fits rights in:
mumbo_sportscar_test_flip_1.jpg
 
[Nintex] said:
Woah that looks great very inspirational. But seeing those kids in the rollercoaster my guess is that it wasn't the Banjo Kart game.

Still this fits rights in:
mumbo_sportscar_test_flip_1.jpg
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Mumbo's car ;)
Thanks for the Rareminion site though, now I'm certain that those are from Banjo Karting...
 
[Nintex] said:
Woah that looks great very inspirational. But seeing those kids in the rollercoaster my guess is that it wasn't the Banjo Kart game.

Still this fits rights in:
mumbo_sportscar_test_flip_1.jpg
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So, it was too cool for xbox gamers.
 
I don't remember if this was posted yet but...

Programmer Brendan Gunn said this in regards to the Banjo kart game:
"I've always wanted to do a racing game. I got to spend two weeks working on a prototype racing game for the Xbox. It was codenamed 'Banjo-Kazoomie', and it was a kind of kart racer, but you constructed the karts out of different parts, so I guess it was kind of a precursor to 'Nuts & Bolts'. But for those two weeks I was doing the driving mechanics for it"

George Andreas had this to say:
"We had a coin-up for a while, didn't we? Mark [Betteridge] was working on a racing game. Can you remember? It was a long time ago now. The working name was 'Balls-Out', as in flat-out."

It's on rareminion and it is originally from the Retro Gamer article on Rare.
 
IOnEI Falcon said:
I don't remember if this was posted yet but...

Programmer Brendan Gunn said this in regards to the Banjo kart game:
"I've always wanted to do a racing game. I got to spend two weeks working on a prototype racing game for the Xbox. It was codenamed 'Banjo-Kazoomie', and it was a kind of kart racer, but you constructed the karts out of different parts, so I guess it was kind of a precursor to 'Nuts & Bolts'. But for those two weeks I was doing the driving mechanics for it"

George Andreas had this to say:
"We had a coin-up for a while, didn't we? Mark [Betteridge] was working on a racing game. Can you remember? It was a long time ago now. The working name was 'Balls-Out', as in flat-out."

It's on rareminion and it is originally from the Retro Gamer article on Rare.
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That's a somewhat different Banjo-Kazoomie. The Banjo-Kazoomie above was done after BK: N&B. Here's one in-game image:

kartingprototype2gce0.jpg

Corresponding concept art: http://www.abload.de/img/tornadoracetrackiuau.jpg

The yellow car is this one: http://www.rareminion.com/images/banjokarting/8999578_orig.jpg
 
IOnEI Falcon said:
So the replacement for Ben has arrived. A man by the name of Neal.
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UK Xbox 360 and Kinect developer Rare. You know – Kinect Sports, Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Piñata, Perfect Dark. Updates by Leigh unless by Mike [MW] or Neal [NC].
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I noticed they removed Ben Talbot [BT] from the list, but they also removed [GM] you know, a fellow by the name of Gregg Mayles...
 
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