Silicon Knights and Rare are the two companies where it is obvious Nintendo had a stranglehold on their quality. People say Nitendo does not do much to produce, "mature" titles but it is obvious by the focus and quality of the titles produced by these second-party companies for Nintendo's consoles that Nintendo (despite not developing these games first-party) do care about these genres.

I called both Rare and Silicon Knights falling off after their sale and release from Nintendo. I thought it was obvious that Nintendo was almost Naziesque in their persuit of the highest quality; they were the glue going unnoticed and even being bashed at the same time. Once the second-party company had produced enough high quality titles or Nintendo saw the company as no longer viable, they would sell them to the highest bidder. The problem is, without Nintendo to press for higher quality, the now released, ex second-party studio starts to produce titles that lack the focus, polish, or shine that was necessary when producing for Nintendo. The problem is (especially in the case of Rare) nobody -even those in thee industry- understand just how insturmental Nintendo is to those second-party developers success.

And even when they fail to continue with their success, nobody goes back and says, "hey, maybe Nintendo had more influence than we thought..." like they should.

Ouch.

Or they, with their demonstrably poor legal understanding, just decided they had the rights to it and would figure out the details later.

That's not as far fetched as it should be.