| leatherhat said: Rare's problems were twofold 1.Mismanagement by MS 2. All of their idea men and skilled employees abandoned ship after the MS purchase, leaving a huge void that could never be filled. Its hard to say MS ruined Rare (besides chasing all the talent away) because Rare pre and post MS are practically two different companies. |
Actually, the majority left before they got bought by Microsoft. That is, the people who worked on their two biggest franchises left before Microsoft bought them, and they formed their own studio. The team behind 007 and Perfect Dark left to form Free Radical 20 months before Perfect Dark launched in 2000. You can hardly blame Microsoft for that, so something was up at Rare before then.
The problem that Rare ran into at Microsoft was two-fold. The Xbox had a more adult audience that Rare's games didn't fit well with, and besides the Banjo series, few of the properties owned by Rare actually sold well. The rest, the Donkey/Diddy Kong games were properties of Nintendo.
I don't think at this point Microsoft is mismanaging them, but they may be getting away from the games some of them originally went to work at Rare for.
For example, there was talk that Rare was working on a new 3D interface for the Xbox 360 after the launch of Kinect. With that recent document featuring Project Fortaleza it would appear that is what part of Rare is working on.
