| Millenium said:
|
It's easy arguing that they made the games, so the lack of quality was their fault, but buying a company as talented an as unique as Rare (their isolated, individual way of creaitng games is well noted) and not nurturing the talent and supporting them properly is completely the buyer's fault. Microsoft should have known that Rare depended on having a creative partnership with Nintendo as well as their own personal way of creating games, and tried to do as much as possible to create that same environment for them, but they were hung out to dry.
Sorry, not backing down on this one.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-02-08-who-killed-rare
Kinect Sports and Avatars, baby!
On 20th of September 2002, Microsoft paid $375 million for this bonsai tree and all that it symbolised: creative excellence, technical mastery, innovation, originality, soul and the precious fingerprints of Nintendo. The fledgling Microsoft Game Studios, desperate to acquire world-class talent that could help establish its game console, saw in that tree everything it desired to become.
"Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning. The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games and they wanted to make them in different ways."
"Rare was always looking East at Japanese and Nintendo's games in particular, with their open-hearted childlike vibrancy and playfulness," explains Hollis. "Meanwhile, Microsoft had a US-centric style to its games, a flair of machismo and testosterone. For the first decade after the Microsoft sale the major problem for the creativity of the studio has been direction. Looking in from the outside it felt as if neither Microsoft or Rare could work out where it was headed."
From the inside the studio's gates, too, the changes to Rare introduced by Microsoft tampered with the recipe of the company's success, leaving teams feeling disorientated, and even downcast.
"The changes were imperceptible at first, but became increasingly rapid as time went on," says Phil Tossell. Hired by Hollis in 1997, he cut his teeth on Diddy Kong Racing before working as lead engineer on Dinosaur Planet (which later became Starfox Adventures). He was present at the company through the Microsoft acquisition, and was promoted to Director of Gameplay in 2009 when he oversaw development of Kinect Sports. "For me personally, the atmosphere became much more stifling and a lot more stressful," he says. "There was an overall feeling that you weren't really in control of what you were doing and that you weren't really trusted either.
"There was also a gradual introduction of certain Microsoft behaviours that crept into the way we did things: lots more meetings, performance reviews and far more regard for your position within the company," he said. "While these weren't necessarily good or bad per se, they began to erode the traditional Rare culture and way of doing things. Many of the people who'd been there a long time found these changes extremely hard to accept."
That culture appears to be the secret of Rare's success in the 1990s, a unique setup in game development at the time. "The general feeling at the time was that, as a company, we were invincible and that anything was possible," says Tossell. "It was incredible to be surrounded by so many talented people, all of whom were single-mindedly focused on making the best games that we could. I never realised it at the time, but I think what was most unique was the sense of freedom and responsibility that the Stampers gave to each team. They trusted us to get the job done. As a result, you always felt like you wanted to do the absolute best that you could for them."
However, in time it became clear that everyone had underestimated how much of the studio's success was down to Nintendo's gentle steering. "It seemed like Microsoft was really a novice in the games industry and for some time they left us to try and see how things worked," Cook explains. "They wanted hit games for their console and since they weren't sure how to go about it they trusted Rare to do what was necessary. The problem here was that Rare was a very long way from the very corporate structure of Microsoft and when Rare had made games it wasn't in isolation from Nintendo but as a creative partnership.
"The kind of support that Nintendo offered wasn't available at Microsoft because Microsoft hadn't the experience. Ed Fries was aware of this, he was a very understanding person and wanted to foster studio culture and allow studios like Rare to build a space for themselves inside the Microsoft structure. Microsoft had a strong corporate identity and was very successful so it was only a matter of time until they applied their tried-and-tested corporate success to their new studio acquisitions."
About a year after the acquisition Fries left Microsoft and the changes became more pronounced. "The biggest change for me was the closing of the testing department. I'd already 'escaped' into design but the shock of losing the up-and-coming talent being developed in testing was a big wake-up call.
