Rare could've been Nintendo's Naughty Dog and Bungie

[Veknoid_Outcast]

Turkish said:

Veknoid_Outcast said:

Ultimate Play the Game/Rareware/Rare was making great games since 1983. It's hard to keep up that level of excellence for decades. Eventually the Stamper brothers had had enough. David Doak, Steve Ellis, and Graeme Norgate wanted to try something new with Free Radical. Martin Hollis left to help Nintendo with GameCube.

The talent was leaving and Nintendo was unprepared to keep pumping money into the studio for more expensive and less impressive titles.

In my opinion, Nintendo has a Bungie/Naughty Dog. It's Retro. Formed in 1998 from former Iguana staff (the dudes who made Turok), it replaced Rare as the western studio Nintendo trusted with its IPs.

Look at the timeline here:

2001: Halo: Combat Evolved, Jak and Daxter
2002: Metroid Prime
2003: Jak II
2004: Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2, Jak 3
2007: Halo 3, Metroid Prime 3, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
2009: Uncharted 2, Halo 3: ODST
2010: Donkey Kong Country Returns, Halo: Reach
2011: Uncharted 3
2013: The Last of Us
2014: Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze
2016: Uncharted 4
2017: ????

Retro is a mid sized studio with only 70 staff. They're only 1/4th of what ND and Bungie are. In the last 15 years I've only seen Metroid Prime and a continuation of a Rare series from them. They're nowhere close to being Rare's replacement. If they were they would be a giant studio on par with ND and Bungie. Rare would have naturally evolved to being a +400 dev house like ND and Bungie over the gens.

Rare was doing whatever they wanted, pumping out classics consistently. Retro seems to do what Nintendo wants. Even the makers of Metroid Prime left Retro.

OK, well what have you seen from Bungie on Xbox? Halo. And Naughty Dog on PS? Jak, Uncharted, and The Last of Us. Don't act as if any of those studios are turning out new and creative games every other year like Rare did in its glory days.

And Nintendo would never support such a large studio. It's not in its design philosophy, especially when a lean and mean Retro can make amazing games without all the bloat.

What you have to understand is that no studio is ever going to replace Rare during its halcyon age. From 1994-2001, Rare had the financial support and stewardship of Nintendo, some of the best and brightest minds in the industry, and a work ethic second to none. Only Nintendo EPD can match what Rare did in the SNES/N64 days.