Who Killed Rare?

[Jumpin]

Mr Puggsly said:

Jumpin said:

Mr Puggsly said:

Jumpin said:

The issue was that Rare was really only great under Nintendo's guidance. They were the hottest developer in the world (even outshining Nintendo and Square), but they got cocky. Without Nintendo, Rare didn't have that guiding force to keep them on top of the industry.

I don't think they needed Nintendo's guidance per se, they needed Nintendo's audience. Rare is more in touch with what Nintendo fans want than Xbox fans. Everything Rare has put out post Nintendo hasn't been bad. In fact, I think all their Xbox games would have sold significantly better on Gamecube and Wii. Those are consoles where casual games and platformers are in demand.

Basically, Rare was great at selling games to the audience Nintendo built. But they couldn't bring a casual audience to the Xbox.

I don't see the connection between simply having Nintendo's audience, and all of the creative breakthroughs Rare had which led to massive industry trends and Rare being an industry leading force.

They made no technological or innovative breakthroughs after Microsoft bought them out; at least none that I can think of that became Industry leading forces like they had before. On SNES, Rare became the first company to use pre-rendered 24-bit graphics, and on a console that was supposed to have only a 16-bit output - this essentially started a revolution, Square would follow with Mario RPG, followed by a couple of other games, and eventually their Smash hit Final Fantasy 7, and Capcom brought Resident Evil 2. Not to mention they took the FPS genre, and brought it to a whole other level with GE007 on the N64 introducing things such as reaction zones, stealth combat, sniper rifles, and the most popular multiplayer mode in a game to date. They didn't really make any further breakthroughs after the N64 era; they certainly weren't leading the industry. This article really covers why that was the case when they discuss the positive morale, the cashflow, and the freedom which the company had in those days when they were under Nintendo's wing.

Well it was a lot easier to be cutting edge in 90s than the 2000s. The bar was raised significantly and Rare couldn't keep up.

GE007 was very cutting edge when it released. But just a few years later Halo was released and made GE007 look perhistoric.

Even under Nintendo's wing I doubt they would be very cutting edge today. Especially since they would have been working on technically inferior hardware.

Of course GE007 looked out of date compared to Halo, Halo came out four and a half years later and on significantly more powerful hardware.

But the question was why Rare was no longer the one raising the bar? Simply saying that it "got harder" is not an adequate statement, because it would have been harder for everyone else too. Since Rare was one of the major companies raising the bar initially, and were the most foreward progressing developers in the industry, a logical conclusion would be that they would be in the best position to continue with that position. The key difference is that Nintendo was no longer guiding them, according to the people interviewed in this article, that is the reason for the comany's collapse.

Had Rare been intact, considering their experience in both first and third person shooters - it is likely we would have got something very much superior to Halo in the form of a Metroid Universe game. Afterall, the remnents of Iguana (the Turok creators), with some added some other development they created Metroid Prime with Nintendo's guidance - imagine what a superior developer like Rare could have been capable of.