The history, if I remember, Zelda is inspired in Ultima, The Origin System looking for Zelda try to create a more accessible game with mouse point click  launch Bad Blood. And Ultima VIII launch this time precision jump with mouse click, resemble Super Mario Bros. Then you have, in 97, Diablo inspired in Ultima VIII

Both GoldenEye and Perfect Dark showed that fps (especially mulitplayer) could work and thrive on consoles.  Games like Halo and Time Splitters that came out the following generation took the formula and expanded it.  Rare at its peak was very important to consoles and kept Nintendo alive during the N64 generation.  Blizzard is incredibly important to the pc market at its peak.  I don't consider Blizzards peak to really coexist with consoles.  Yes we got games like Starcraft 64 and Diablo games on the PS4/Xbox One but really their major contributions during their peak is pc.  Any gamer that had a Nintendo system in the 90's is going to say Rare, and gamer that was a pc gamer is going to pick Blizzard.  Now considering Blizzard made such a huge addicting game in WOW that lead to people around the world getting so addicted to it that they would lose jobs, their wifes/husbands maybe its hard not to say Blizzard, but if someone never played those games and love Rare they are going to pick Rare.

I wasn't aware of Ultima 8, so probably that preceded Diablo. All I know is that Diablo started development really as a classic roguelike, meaning it was turn-based, the world only moved once the player made a move. Changing that to real-time changed the whole feel of the game.

It does help if you actually played the games first Don.

Weak attempt at belittling and dismissing his stance. 

How is playing the games helping anyone to know the actual data about the games? 

It does not.

Sales data and critical reception are what indicate if they dominated or not. And sure enough, just with Donkey Kong Country’s series on the SNES, they sold similarly to Nintendo’s domestic studios’s own games and were received similarly during the same era.

With that in mind, yes, his assertion is wrong. But having played the games or not has absolutely no bearing in this. 

I did play at least Battletoads, the 3 Donkey Kong, 2 Banjo Kazooies and Golden Eye. Perhaps even more.

But there were better beat them up, platforms and FPS imho.

Haven`t said Rare wasn`t great (because they were), but they didn`t dominate any genre at all. They were great and made great games in different genres, but weren`t the dominating power in any.

@Hynad. When you put that they had similar reception to Nintendo internal studios, sure that show they were in the same ballpark. But to dominate something you need to be above the others, and neither sales nor critical reception put them above the others (although there were those rumors of Rare being run to the ground due to jealously from Shigeru).

EDIT - If the question was which were my favorite developer at their prime then Rare would win by a landslide (although I really loved Warcraft 2 at the time), but when talking about genre domination, imho Rare didn`t dominate.

Heh, I look and see this vote is close, but then remember that most of this forum hasn't played the best old school PC games. It's Blizzard. It's not even close. This is not to take away from Rare who used to make great games. But Blizzard was frikken amazing. I can't tell if they were touched by God or made a deal with the devil (i.e. Diablo). For a while there it really seemed like they could do no wrong though.

Ultima series inspired too many games, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Legend of Zelda, Skyrim, Diablo, WoW, etc. 

Please don't say Skyrim in a sentence like this, say Elder Scrolls instead. Skyrim is a lesser entry in the Elder Scrolls series where the peak was Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. 

yeah, elders scrolls, but Skyrim is one of the best-selling entry