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Forums - Nintendo - 3 Games Rare Made That Would Have Been Successful on the Wii U

oniyide on 09 September 2012
ToraReaper said:
lilbroex said:
ToraReaper said:
I think a rare game that would be a smash hit on the Wii U would be Kinect Sports... just rebrand and make it the Wii Sports pack in with the console :P


Why would Nintendo want an inferior rip off of their own product? An HD rerelease of wii-sports would be better than that.

Kinect Sports was far more fun than Wii Sports.


THis. It is the best of these first party sports compilation arcade games and this is coming from a non xbox fan. Kinect sports>Sports Chamions,WiiSports Resort>>>>WiiSports



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Soundwave on 09 September 2012
NightDragon83 said:
Soundwave said:

 

Hindsight being what it is, I would've gone to Rare and done the following in late 1997 --

Insisted they make another Bond game. If they wanted to make a game called Perfect Dark with aliens and what not -- great. Greenlight that too. But a new Bond game is for Nintendo, and fast track that for the 1999 holiday season.

Perfect Dark could continue on development as a GameCube launch title, as the game barely ran on the N64 anyway. 

Sometimes you gotta lay down the law a little bit as a publisher/owner, you can't just let the designers make whatever they want. It's like letting inmates run the asylum. A game like GoldenEye comes out of nowhere and sells 7 million copies? Not making a sequel to that would be like not making a sequel to Donkey Kong Country, just not good business.

In the long term it would've been good for Rare too, because a new Bond game for November 1999, probably could've crushed another 5-6+ million plus and that would've sealed the deal on Nintendo keeping Rare for the next 5-6 years IMO. So Rare wouldn't have had to have dealt with the crappy Microsoft era where most of the employees left anyway.

Me thinks Captain Hindsight here needs to crack a history book.  First of all, EA bought the rights to make James Bond games in 1998, so even if Rare wanted to, they couldn't make another Bond game.  Perfect Dark was for all intents and purposes a successor to GoldenEye, just with an original theme instead of being based off the Bond license... and it ran just fine on the N64.  The mandatory use of the expansion pack allowed for much crisper visuals, nearly a dozen computer bots in multiplayer, and a co-op / counter co-op story mode way before modern shooters started doing it.

As for Rare leaving Nintendo, you're barking up the wrong tree here because simply having another "Bond" game wouldn't have changed that outcome.  By 2000, many key figures at Rare had already departed (who later formed Free Radical and did the Timesplitters games), and Nintendo started becoming a bit too controlling with Rare... Conker's BFD was born out of frustration with the family-friendly approach of Nintendo and the way their console was viewed by most gamers as the "kiddy" console (Nintendo wouldn't even advertise Conker when it came out), and their original IP Dinosaur Planet was supposed to rival that of Zelda and be the N64's swan song but Nintendo, specifically Miyamoto, insisted that Rare shoehorn the Starfox license into the game because the main character looked alot like Fox, which changed the game completely.

By the time M$ came along and made them an offer, Rare had already asked Nintendo to purchase the other 51% in the company and own them outright, and Nintendo declined because they felt it was too expensive.  You can't blame M$ for Rare's track record over the past decade either... before they became known as the "Kinect Sports" guys they currently are, Rare released a string of mediocre original titles and underwhelming sequels like PD Zero and BK Nuts and Bolts, so Rare have only themselves to blame for ruining their once untouchable status in the industry.


Actually again this is not entirely accurate. After it became obvious that GoldenEye was a surprise break out hit by holiday 1997, NCL approached Rare to make another Bond game and was prepared to renew the license with Danjaq/MGM (the Bond folkes). Martin Hollis and a bunch of key Rare staff said they wanted to make something new though, so NCL listened to them, which is a decision I think eventually haunts Rareware to this day. It was only after that that EA secured the Bond license.

Martin Hollis basically convinced Nintendo not to renew the Bond license, wanted to make Perfect Dark, and basically ended up bailing out on Perfect Dark before it was completed on top of that. In a way honestly looking back at it he screwed Nintendo + Rare out of what should've been a massive money maker by wanting to make a vanity project, and then bailing out on said project without even seeing it through to the end. Then he went on to basically do nothing at Zoonami (what a waste).

Perfect Dark predictably was not the same sized hit that GoldenEye was. It sold about 2.5-3 million copies to the 7-8 million that GoldenEye did. Bond is a classic character who fit perfectly with Nintendo and brought a "mature/cool" character to the Nintendo fold without having to be ridiculously over-the-top in violence.

When Nintendo evaluated whether or not they wanted to keep Rare around in 2002, this no doubt was central to their decision -- simply put, Rare by pissing away a sure-fire blockbuster series in James Bond/007, devalued their studio worth. Add to the fact that Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie or DK64 weren't the hits that DKC was, and that Conker/Jet Force Gemini/etc. weren't big hits either .... it put Rare in a position where they became expendable to Nintendo.

Something that never would've happened IMO if they had a more recent blockbuster under their belt (which should've been that second Bond game). People leave studios all the time, that's never been a huge issue. Most of the staff from Metroid Prime is basically completely gone from Retro for example. If Rare had delivered Nintendo a 5-6 million selling "The World Is Not Enough" (or other 007 project) for Nintendo by fall 1999-spring 2000, they wouldn't have been on the chopping block two years later. No way IMO.

Nintendo would've doubled down on them and probably made a third Bond game on the GameCube and that would've kept Rare in Nintendo's good books for a futher several years. Nintendo does not dump studios that are profitable to them. Also Conker was advertised, it had a Comedy Central TV sponsorship and TV spots, it just came out way too late in the N64 lifecycle (or should've been transferred to the GCN launch). I agree that Miyamoto should've kept his nose out of Dinosaur Planet, great designer himself, but shouldn't be the guy telling another studio what to do.