Their relatively young age and bedroom-coding beginnings mean that video-game developers are often treated more like close friends than service providers. There is an intimacy between the gamer and the developer not found in other media. Individual authors or directors may be followed avidly but only in games are whole teams held with such love and affection.
Covering Rare’s new Xbox One game Kinect Sports Rivals it’s been clear that fans still hold the developer in high esteem while at the same time harking back to their “glory” days. Of course, my kids only know the developer during their Microsoft MSFT -0.42% era but they were interested to see the older games they made in the past.
At the studio to see Kinect Sports Rivals I took the opportunity to get a tour through Rare’s historic artifacts with Design Director Gregg Mayles. After taking a stroll down their art corridor with all sorts of exhibits from Viva Piñata Japanese Box Art to Banjo-Kazooie, we were introduced to a prototype version of Kinect along with an impressive array of their back catalog.
By the end of the tour we had taken in the Ultimate ZX Spectrum Games, NES titles like Battletoads, and California Games, Gameboy games Battletoads, Banjo, Beetlejuice and even the Rareware Coin-Op Arcade Game, Super Battle Toads. Then on N64 there was Golden Eye as well as a look at the rare Bulky Drive Disk Drive 64DD. This brought us right up to the modern day with Cameo and Perfect Dark on the Xbox, and prototype hardware for Kinect.
Prototype Kinect
Although Mayles wouldn’t be drawn on Rare’s next project, or a new Perfect Dark game, he did say that “it’s a game we hold dear to our heart, we’re kind of always looking for new ways of creating entertainment whether that’s revisiting old IP or creating new IP or anything in between. We’ll never rule anything out.”
