Retro's peak was from roughly 2002 to 2014, when they released roughly one game every three years. None of their later games lived up to Metroid Prime's reception, but they were still batting around 90 on Metacritic on average.
Rare is a bit hard to directly compare both due to the smaller scale of game development during their 1994 to 2001 peak, along with the number of smaller projects they made. Not to mention that Metacritic doesn't go far back enough to cover all of their notable works. Still, of their 11 N64 games, 8 had a Metascore of at least 85. Looking at the top rated SNES games on GameFAQs, the entire DKC trilogy is there. And on the Game Boy and GBC, you have 2 and 4 games in their respective Top 50's for the platform.
That's a total of roughly 17 good-to-great games released over an 8 year period. Even pre-2000, that is a level of output only rarely ever seen. The average Retro game was probably better, but Rare's best games were roughly as good and much more frequent.
EDIT: The only devs I can think of with a better output would be Square circa 1991 to 2002. They were putting out roughly 2 or 3 all-time classics per year.
Last edited by Salnax - on 19 June 2026
