Rare Claims That Nobody Knows Who The Company Is

[theRepublic]

dsister44 said:

theRepublic said:
In case anyone is interested, I found a better description of what went down between Rare and Nintendo.

"When Nintendo first invested in Rare they only purchased about 15% of the company, and probably only paid about $20,000 to do it. After that, whenever the Stampers wanted more money, they would sell another little chunk of the company to Nintendo at their (ever increasing) regular market value. Nintendo eventually ended up owning 49% of the company.

When Rare's stock value hit about $500 million ($250 of which belonging to the Stampers), the Stampers thought Rare's stock had gone about as high as it could go, so they decided to take their winnings and cash out before the price went down. They didn't want to sell 2% of the company to Nintendo for some more chump change, lose control of the company (not even to Nintendo), and then watch their $250 million slip away for some reason they had no control over. So they offered to sell the company outright to Nintendo. Nintendo was not interested in paying approximately $250 million to keep Rare, and asked Rare to find other buyers.

For reference, at about the same time, Yamauchi set up a fund called Fund Q using $200 million of his own money and loaned it to small developers to get them to publish Cube games. Even the loan of this kind of money was enough to even secure Square support on the GameCube. Also, control of Retro was bought out for a mere 1 million dollars, but it's unknown how much money Nintendo spent setting up the studio (Nintendo was footing the bills before and after the buyout).

The Stampers received offers from at least Microsoft and Activision (yeah, the pussies who recently canned Goldeneye XBLA because Iwata didn't like it), and went with Microsoft's offer to buy 100% of the company, including the IP's, for $375 million. The Stampers bought Nintendo's 49% and sorted out/bought all their IP's back from Nintendo for $100 million (on credit), and then sold the whole bundle to Microsoft, making $275 million for themselves.

In a completely unrelated story, one month after selling their stake in the UK developer, Nintendo was fined approximately $100 million by the European Union for NES-era price fixing.

The Stampers took paying jobs for Microsoft and ran Rare for four years before leaving to 'pursue other opportunities', but AFAIK no new startup company has been announced."

ok, thank you for posting that. do you happen to have the link?

Sure

Posted here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=10333041&postcount=180

Confirmed by Rare employee here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=10333860&postcount=197