At their absolute best, which famed Nintendo partner do you think was the more talented developer, Rare Ltd or Retro Studios, and what's your reasoning?

Mind you, this is not the same as "which is better overall/to this day" but rather which peaked the highest.

Rare.

DKC 1-3, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie...

By "peaked higher", do we mean over a certain time span or the highest crowning achievement from either of them?

Highest peak moment from either company? Retro with Metroid Prime on the Gamecube, by a decent margin.

But at their peak as a company, then Rare for sure. Their N64 output was arguably as predominant as Nintendo's games. Retro can't hold a candle to that many fantastic games with that much variety in a single generation.

Highest high point I meant; volume of output isn't really a fair comparison as it's much easier to pump out SNES/N64 games quickly compared to Gamecube and up.

@bolded:  I did consider that, but at the same time, developers weren't as experienced with 3D development in the N64 days and to sustain such a high quality across so many titles during the primitive 3D era was amazing.

Either way, if you meant highest high point then I guess I should have voted for Retro.  Oops.

True, I don't mean to downplay Rare's achievements, it's more just that by the time Gamecube rolled around it wasn't really feasible for one studio to pump out games as rapidly as Rare did in their prime.

Retro made what to my eyes are the two best video games on their respective genres (Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze). While the best Rare games are VERY good, none of them reach that level (to me at least).

If we can't compare in terms of volume of output, line-up Vs line-up, then is this really just a Rares best game Vs Retro's best game?

Or "Did rare make a game better than Metroid Prime?". I don't really get it.

Rare in the 90s were by far better, I feel like this needed wording very differently if your intention is not to pit their full outputs at their peak against each other. Without special criteria to help them out Retro gets stomped.

Rare were absolutely better at their peak. If the question is who had the best single game out of their two respective libraries the answer may be different.

Basically, in terms of quality, rather than quantity, which was the more talented developer at their best.

The best of each would be one way to measure it, yes.

I love both studios deeply, but I feel like this is an easy win for Rare. It was very, very good during the ZX Spectrum and NES days and it was arguably the best developer in the world from 1994-2000. It turned out a great game every single year during that time  — sometimes more than one great game a year. And there was so much diversity in terms of genre: racing, fighting, platforming, shooting, whatever the heck Blast Corps is. Even if we only look at the best game from each developer, I'd argue Rare, at worst, ties. For me, Banjo-Kazooie is equal in quality to Metroid Prime.

I will say it remains incredibly impressive to me that Nintendo gracefully moved away from Rare as the wheels were coming off and transitioned to Retro, which immediately put out a masterpiece. You went from Perfect Dark and Banjo-Tooie in 2000 to Metroid Prime in 2002. And you didn't have to spend $375 million for the privilege.