I only truly joined the ring with Nintendo in 2006 when the Wii came out. I've since dedicated a lot of time to playing their back catalog and inevitably Rare has come up. As someone who doesn't have nostalgia goggles for Rare here, can I be brutally honest? I don't think their games have aged well. I'm sure they were revolutions for their time, but it's hard for me to see them in that context. I enjoyed the Banjo games, but they wouldn't make a list of my top 10 platformers (nor would Super Mario 64, but that's unrelated). Goldeneye is historically a very important game, so I credit it for that, but ultimately it's a game that has been very much built upon in the years since and so it doesn't really hold up today. Few other Rare N64 games have really excited me at all.
Meanwhile, while Rare were making these games that I am personally at best split on, what were Nintendo EAD doing? Making The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, my favourite N64 game and one of my favourite games of all time full stop. It should be noted I only first played OoT in 2008, and I loved it then as I loved it now. For me it's the only Nintendo 64 game I've played that really holds up (it should be noted I'm yet to play Majora's Mask). So I guess Rare won on quantity of good games, but ultimately in my opinion Nintendo's best blew them out of the park.
Since then Nintendo have continued to be a phenomenal developer and unfortunately Rare have fallen from grace, obviously particularly since Microsoft purchased them. I'm not saying people who love Rare are wrong or anything, but I just wanted to provide a counter-opinion because I hear so much about the games they developed for the Nintendo 64 and I just am not so impressed.
Sidenote: The DKC trilogy is a fantastic set of games and I wouldn't dream of criticising them.
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