Was Nintendo right to opt out of the graphics arms race?

[OlfinBedwere]

Soundwave said:

The damning thing about the 007 situation is I believe Danjaq/MGM (the company that owns the Bond rights) gave Nintendo first right of refusal to get the rights for future games and Yamauchi I believe was even going to do it but Rareware talked him out of it.

Pretty classic example of shooting yourself in the foot. When you have a success like that, stop overthinking it and just acknowledge you've hit on something bigger than yourself and get out of your own way. If Nintendo had secured the Bond rights, likely Rareware is never sold away in the first place and left to rot at Microsoft, so they really screwed over the entire studio. They would have be far better off under Nintendo.

To be fair, Rare wanted to take the lessons they had learned from Goldeneye and create an intellectual property that they'd own the full rights to. It's just that the plan went a bit south when the Goldeneye team broke away from the company to create their own IP.

But yeah, Perfect Dark had a huge hype train about it when it was released. Maybe it would have lost a little steam in the Gamecube era (in a hypothetical timeline where Rare didn't get sold to Microsoft), but a Rare-developed Perfect Dark game for the Wii could have been a major hit if they'd gotten the motion controls right.