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HappySqurriel on 22 November 2009
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Joelcool7 said:
HappySqurriel said:

Microsoft didn’t kill Rare, and you could argue that they were the victim in the situation ...

In the late 90s, Rare's success caused every major studio and publisher to attempt to poach Rare's talent away from them; and in general, they were highly successful. As this continued, Rare's games were seeing longer and longer delays and (it could be argued) were lower and lower quality; and Nintendo was spening more and more time managing Rare to get products out the door. The Stamper Bros wanted to retire off of the equity in Rare and offered to sell the studio to Nintendo, who didn't believe that it was worth what they were asking and declined.

Microsoft needed a well known first party studio and foolishly bought the controlling interest in Rare from the Stamper Bros. and then Nintendo sold their stake in Rare to Microsoft as well. Since then, Rare has only released a handful of games and very few of them have been particularly good or sold well.


The best analogy to the situation is that Microsoft bought a used sports car and found out it was a Lemon upon delivery

A lemon upon delivery? Rare maintained its staff fairly well untill around 06, the Stamper Brothers remained on board and many other leading developers were their untill the beginning of this generation. Fact is Microsoft ruined Rare, many of the former amazing staff left Rare awhile after Microsoft took over, forming their own studios or going to work for other companies.

Under Microsoft Rare has yet to release a true jaw dropping game as they did for Nintendo on multiple occasions. The closest would have to be PerfectDark on the 360 but even that wasn't up to Rare's history of AAA+ titles. Fact is after buying Rare Microsoft drove most of the former staff to quit, this is fully Microsoft's fault.

The origional analogy that Microsoft killed Rare is true. If Nintendo had remained in charge Rare would probubly still be a great notable developer. But once Microsoft took over it all went down hill!

Lemon was probably too harsh of a term, but there had been a steady (noticeable) decline in Rare's ability to deliver a high quality gaming experience on time and under budget throughout the life of the N64. Many of Rare's late N64 releases were in full development for 3 full years at a time where a typical videogame took 12 to 15 months to develop, and a big-budget blockbuster was typically in the 2 years range; and this would have been acceptable if all of their games were the same quality as earlier N64 titles, but many games (Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64) were demonstrating the signs of a studio that had lost a lot of their design talent.

Certainly, Microsoft buying Rare caused a lot of people to flee the company and made a bad situation worse; but Rare was already in pretty-bad shape long before Microsoft got there. It is likely that had Nintendo maintained their relationship with Rare, Rare probably would have released more than Starfox Adventures last generation; but (unless something drastic happened) it is likely that each of these games would have been a $20+ Million effort to get a game that was just above average in quality.

Edit: To put it another way, a lot of people have been critical of Nintendo not continuing second-party relationships with Rare and Silicone Knights; and for not making Free-Radical design or Factor 5 second party studios. In hindsight, with how these studios have performed in recent time, it should be clear that Nintendo potentially evaluated these companies and saw the problems that caused their recent falls from grace.