Best Rare game on N64

[Slownenberg]

Cobretti2 said:

Signalstar said:
Goldeneye. Perfect Dark is a close second. It's multiplayer is even better with the bots (I hated Perfect Sim so much), but Goldeneye laid the foundation and had a great singleplayer.

I did not realize how prolific Rare was on the N64. Why did Nintendo sell them to Microsoft? Seems like they were a huge asset.

Because Nintendo are morons at times.  They lay out all this good ground work every generation, Then somehow find something to cock it up.

I have always been under the impression selling off Rare was a brilliant move by Nintendo, because once Rare joined Microsoft they were a shadow of their former selves, but it seems that is due to the fact that a lot of people left Rare in the transition, and not just because they lost their spark.

Looking at wikipedia it seems there was a bidding war between Activision, Nintendo, and Microsoft. And Microsoft offered the most money, but this was started because Nintendo didn't offer Rare more capital to make more expensive games in the jump from N64 to GC, nor did they offer to buy out the rest of the stake in Rare. And 30 people left during the transition to Microsoft. So while Microsoft got a shadow of Rare and Nintendo made a bunch of money from it, if Nintendo had just held onto Rare all those people wouldn't have left so Rare might have continued being the second best game dev studio in the biz behind Nintendo, and continued to make amazing games for Nintendo systems. Instead they fell apart and faded into irrelevance on Xbox.