It should also be noted a lot of what's being said about Rare is actually false here.
Nintendo DID have the opportunity to retain Rare if they wanted to. The Stampers gave Nintendo the first option. Nintendo is the one who refused to buy the Stampers share of the company and continue their exclusivity agreement.
After that, a period followed where the Stampers were looking for a company to take over Rare. Activision was in on the bidding.
Microsoft simply offered the most money but their offer did not come into the picture until 2002. The rest is history.
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2002/09/20/official-nintendo-ends-relationship-with-rare
http://www.rarefandabase.com/exclusive-rare-microsoft-ten-years-of-games-and-controversy/
BTW, that Rare interview that people keep linking to from the Stamper Bros. is FAKE from a parody site.
Personally I honestly think this was a bad deal for Nintendo in the *long run*. Even though they got approximately $180 million from MS for the sale, I think Rare's output in successive years could earned Nintendo more money and covered them during damaging drought periods.
Assuming that say Banjo-Kazoowii, Perfect Dark Wii, Donkey Kong Country, Diddy Kong Racing 2, and the other stable of expected Rare games came out on Wii + DS, I think it's fair to say they could have sold 15 million copies (Rare sold like 30 million between DKC and GoldenEye alone, lets assume that declines though but they still do OK with the big Wii/DS userbases), at say $15 profit per copy for Nintendo, that's $225 million in profit from that gen alone.
I don't think it was the slam dunk deal a lot of people paint it out to be, it turned out IMO to be lose-lose-lose for all of Nintendo-Rare-MS. A lot of Rare's IP would've sold well on the Wii and DS IMO and the added development size would've helped the 3DS and Wii U immensely too.
