IGN Presents the History of Rare

Most game developers play it safe by specializing, or even over-specializing, when it comes to their output. They stick to a precious few genres and systems they know, and if they try to jump their licenses to unfamiliar platforms, most often they'll farm the job out to another specialty developer. Everybody sticks to what they know. Finding a company that drifts from shooters to platformers to sports to fighters, racers, adventure, puzzle games and more, jumping from PC to console to mobile with wanton glee is, indeed, Rare.

For most of its history, Rare was the singular vision of two brothers driven by their love of games and need for success. They brought a new philosophy to both game design and production, setting records that are likely to stand for decades to come, and achieved rockstar status while shunning the limelight completely. And on the way, they produced some of the seminal titles in video game history.

It's not just anybody who can do that.

So Unusual

1982 was a major year in videogame development. In a spare Menlo Park venture capitalist office, Trip Hawkins finished his business plan and incorporated Electronic Arts. To the north, George Lucas partnered with Atari and created Lucasfilm Games, a new division of his fledging empire. Thousands of miles across the Pacific, Yasuhiro Fukushima changed the name of his company from Eidansha Boshu Service Center to the more curt Enix, and held a game programming contest to help shift its product line over to video games.

In Leicestershire, England, brothers Tim and Chris Stamper founded Ashby Computers and Graphics Ltd. They'd spent years programming dozens of arcade games while working for others; now they wanted to work for themselves, making and owning their own titles in the home market. Their platform of choice was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit personal computer popular in the UK. For their first release, elder brother Chris designed a game based on their action-arcade sensibilities while Tim coded the graphics. The result was Jetpac, a busy and addictive game that combines platforming and collection with a lot of shooting pesky aliens. Rather than publish it under ACG, the Stampers created another pseudonym: Ultimate Play the Game.

Over the next two years, Ultimate became the top game developer in the UK with an unbroken string of hits. Most game companies at the time were interchangeable and invisible to the gamers who bought their products, but Ultimate's singular style made them instantly recognizable to anyone to who took their gaming seriously. The quality is amazingly consistent from Pssst and Trans Am to Sabre Wulf and Jetpac sequel Lunar Jetman, and the unique, strangely cryptic introductions that preface each one stick in the memory.

A rabid fanbase formed around the Ultimate brand, made even more rabid by the Stampers' apparent seclusion. The brothers attended no conferences, seldom gave interviews, and came off as universally media shy. While the Stampers weren't exactly eager to step into the public spotlight, they also didn't really have the time. They were renowned for working eighteen hour days, seven days a week, only knocking off between the hours of 2:00-8:00 a.m. Their philosophy was that a part-time employee resulted in a part-time game. By contrast, they committed totally and required their team to do the same as well... the first true crunch mentality in the industry. Nobody was held to that philosophy more stringently than the Stampers themselves. In the three years they slaved to Ultimate, they only ever took two days off. Both were Christmas mornings.

As such, the Stampers' only real contact with their loyal followers was though the games they released. There, at least, the lines of communication were strong. A dozen games came out of a company with about as many employees in just a few years, and every one a smash success by UK standards. Jetman and Sabreman became franchise heroes; Knight Lore, Sabreman's third outing, presented the first isometric 3D game in history. Ultimate was innovating despite the draining output. Glowing reviews became a constant. Sales remained encouragingly high.

So it was quite a shock to the system when, in 1985, the Stampers sold the Ultimate brand to British game publisher U.S. Gold, and abandoned the Spectrum platform.

The previous year, Chris and Tim had gotten their first look at a brand new product out of Japan called the Nintendo Famicom, and saw the future in it. Even while Ultimate maintained its punishing release schedule, the brothers decided the Spectrum was a dead-end, and the time to move on had come. They quickly formed a special subdivision inside Ashby Computers and Graphics Ltd. to reverse-engineer the Famicom and broke into the code for every Famicom game they could get their hands on. By the time U.S. Gold came into the picture, they'd long since figured out how to develop for Nintendo's console. It wouldn't be released in the UK for another year.

The subdivision was codenamed "Rare."

Turning Japanese

With Ultimate Play the Game signed away, the Stampers took a few software samples to Kyoto, Japan, and presented them to Nintendo executives as proof of what they could bring to the table. No Western company had ever attempted anything like it. Nintendo responded by doing something equally unique, giving the Stampers an unlimited budget to produce as many games a year as they liked, effectively bypassing quality assurance limitations imposed on other third party companies. The Stampers were now officially a Nintendo shop, and they committed all their resources to the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Back home in England, fans and press alike wondered what their wonder boys could possibly be thinking. The Spectrum still dominated the UK home computer market. Nintendo didn't register outside of Donkey Kong arcade cabinets. The Stamper brothers' new company -- now officially called Rare -- started producing an insane number of games for a system few people owned or cared about in their own country, and their fame took a corresponding hit.

Not that Chris or Tim minded so much. They just wanted to make games, and they weren't all that picky about what kind of games they were. Rare got into the business of licensed games based on properties ranging from A Nightmare on Elm Street to Hollywood Squares, and NES ports of popular titles such as Marble Madness, Narc, and Sid Meier's Pirates! They stepped into the mobile space, producing work for the newly hatched Game Boy. Less than half their output were original games. Some, like the popular beat-em-up Battletoads (itself a riff on the more popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video games), were done in-house. Others, like entries in the Wizards & Warriors trilogy and a third Jetman shooter, Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warship, were farmed out to the Pickford brothers at Zippo Games, a studio the Stampers frequently worked with and eventually bought.

Creatively, Rare had downshifted. The innovations were absent, the games sturdy but largely unspectacular. As a trade-off, Rare's work got exposure far beyond England's smallish market, and the Stampers got a ton of games to pick over and dissect and learn from as they ported the code over. They did all the grunt work without complaint. They paid dues, discovered new tricks, and made a mint in the process.

By 1991, as the brothers often predicted to deaf ears, Nintendo had conquered Japan and North America. All those easy games translated to easy money, and a lot of it.

Rare produced around sixty games for the NES and Game Boy in just five years, along with a handful of product for the Sega Genesis and Game Gear -- more than one complete, functioning, commercial game every month. They'd learned how to push the hardware as far as it could go, and a few tricks to edge it a little further than that. Then Nintendo traded the NES up to the SNES, and Rare wasn't entirely ready for the shift. They were suddenly back to square one and, even more unfamiliar to the Stampers, behind the curve instead of out in front.

Staying there wasn't an option. If they'd missed the boat on the fourth generation hardware launch, they had the means to cut ahead of the pack on the latest software innovations.

Rare dialed their releases way back to just a few Battletoads offerings (including a crossover with the Double Dragon franchise) and invested a chunk of their massive NES profits into Silicon Graphics workstations. That move instantly made Rare the most technologically advanced developer in the UK, and placed them fairly high up for the rest of the world. Chris, Tim, and their engineers started figuring out how to take bitmapping out of the equation and create a game as a full CGI render, starting with a simple boxing game to get the hang of things.

Word of their progress reached Kyoto. Nintendo soon bought a 25% stake in the company, eventually expanding to 49%, and offered their catalogue of characters to create a CGI game around. The Stampers asked for Donkey Kong.

Five years translating every game Nintendo threw at them gave the Stampers all the time in the world to analyze the Japanese style of level and gameplay design, and now they put it all into practice. Their company was renamed Rareware, and Donkey Kong Country launched in late November, 1994. Perhaps in a nod to the critics who'd questioned their sanity nearly ten years before, it reached stores in the UK a day earlier than North America, two days before Japan, and it sold like crazy everywhere.

It was the first Donkey Kong game developed outside Japan, without Shigeru Miyamoto's influence (reportedly to his annoyance), the first to use pre-rendered 3D graphics on a console and, at over nine million units, the second-best selling game in the SNES catalogue... right behind Miyamoto's own Super Mario World. Unusual for a platformer of that time, two playable characters share the screen at once; Donkey Kong, a more even-tempered descendant of the original arcade monkey, and a faster, more agile buddy created specially for the game: Diddy Kong. The CGI graphics wowed everyone. While its reputation has faded somewhat in retrospect, Donkey Kong Country took several Game of the Year honors and put Rareware front and center once again as a top development house. Sequels and spin-offs would file out for years to come.

If Mario was officially the face of Nintendo, his old adversary was now the unofficial mascot of Rareware.

License to Kill

While DK and friends were on their way to a franchise cumé of thirty million units sold, arcade gamers were busy pounding each other into goo in Killer Instinct, a fighting game running Silicon Graphics CGI renders on Rare's own custom-built hardware. It was the Stampers' answer to Mortal Kombat, complete with "No Mercy" fatality moves and a lycanthropic "Sabrewulf" character, demonstrating they were still up for some of the hard stuff. When the N64 replaced the SNES, they drove the point home.

Their opening salvo was Blast Corps, a fairly merciful game about using construction equipment and giant robots to smash down cities and towns before a pair of wayward nuclear missiles on a transport truck hit them. But well before Blast Corps went into production, Rare engineers had spent years on what would become one of the cornerstone titles in video game history.

After legal wrangling kept the series out of theaters for six years, Pierce Brosnan had made his long-delayed and much-lauded debut as James Bond in 1995's GoldenEye, widely seen as a franchise reboot of sorts, and Nintendo acquired the rights to make the video game tie-in. They promptly handed the property over to the Stampers, who weren't entirely sure how to approach it. Mr. Kiss-Kiss Bang-Bang didn't exactly fit in with the N64's family friendly image. After discussing the matter with project lead Martin Hollis, everyone agreed that if Nintendo didn't want a hyper-violent game, they should've better familiarized themselves with how 007 typically conducted business.

Development went forward on a first-person Bond rail-shooter for the SNES, then transferred to the N64 when the hardware came along. With the N64's increased capabilities in play, Rare took Bond off the rails and made it a fully free-roaming 3D shooter. The largely inexperienced design team, led by Hollis and David Doak, still put in the traditionally insane number of hours Rare work required, but now that the company wasn't releasing fifteen titles a year, all that effort went into one game. They started throwing in all kinds of tweaks into their little movie tie-in, things nobody else had ever tried. Different areas of the body would take different levels of damage, with headshots being instantly fatal. Sniper rifles could be zoomed in on targets. Stealth elements came in, from using suppressed weaponry to sneaking past unsuspecting guards to removing security cameras. Rather than go by the Doom model of kill everything, exit room, missions and objectives vary by level. And then there is the multiplayer. It came in at the last minute, an afterthought, and it rocks as hard as the rest of the game.

It shouldn't have worked at all. A console FPS, a movie tie-in made three years after the movie, cobbled together over two and a half years by a team of first-timers at a company that many felt wasted years producing cheap movie tie-ins. Everything spelled disaster.

GoldenEye 007 was a revelation and a revolution. It became the non-PC first-person shooter, the only one that made sense and played spectacularly. One in four N64 users owned it. Rare was named Best UK Developer by BAFTA, and GoldenEye 007 took Console Action Game of the Year, Console Game of the Year, Interactive Title of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Software Engineering at the 1998 Interactive Achievement Awards.

Its reputation for top-quality gaming now firmly re-established, Rareware turned back to platforming for Dream, the story of a boy named Edison taking on pirate captain Blackeye with a wooden sword and help from a man-rabbit, a rather stupid dog, and a fairly confused bear. The gameplay was designed around the 3D platforming standards set down by Miyamoto in Mario 64, with a few Rare touches and refinements thrown in for good measure. By the time it was shown at E3 2007, Edison was out and Banjo the bear took over as the lead, along with his partner, Kazooie the bird. Nintendo hyped it as the Donkey Kong Country of the N64, and put together a Taco Bell merchandizing tie-in for it. Unfortunately, delays pushed it out past the target holiday season. Fortunately, Rareware covered by releasing Diddy Kong Racing, capitalizing on their character from Donkey Kong Country and featuring Banjo as a playable racer. Diddy Kong Racing took the Console Racing trophy at the 1999 Interactive Achievement Awards

Banjo-Kazooie released later that year, and was nominated for Game of the Year at the 1999 Interactive Achievement Awards. It won in the Console Action/Adventure and Art Direction categories. Rare had another new franchise, and a new mascot.

Publicly, Rare was on a roll. Behind the scenes, employee turnover bordered on disastrous.

In the few interviews they granted, Tim and Chris Stamper came across as quiet, unassuming Englishmen, but the pace they maintained and the demands they set could grate at closer range. Their longtime partners at Zippo Games, the Pickfords, left shortly after the Stampers bought them out in the 80's and deep-sixed a favored wrestling game. By the N64 years, their tiny company had grown from the low teens to several hundred, but the Stampers kept their hands firmly in every project, and that management style didn't sit well with everyone. The first public defection happened in 1997, when a group of employees marched out en masse to form Eighth Wonder, a studio dedicated to developing for Sony. Well into the three-year production cycle for a successor to GoldenEye 007, Hollis and Doak decided they'd had their fill as well, taking much of their production teams with them. On top of that, Rare produced Donkey Kong 64 and third-person shooter Jet Force Gemini in 1999 to decent reviews, which looked dismal compared to their previous three releases.

They'd set the bar too high. Good wasn't good enough anymore.

Dirty Tricks

Attention turned to their new first-person shooter built on an enhanced GoldenEye engine. The Stampers had rejected the idea of another Bond game out of hand, preferring to go with an original IP owned by Rare. Hollis and Doak left them with a rough framework to build on, inspired in equal parts by the works of Phillip K. Dick and Ghost in the Shell: female corporate spy Joanna Dark, operating against the backdrop of an alien war. Originally, light and darkness played a big role in the gunplay, but those features were scaled back to muzzle flashes and nightvision goggles.

Nevertheless, Perfect Dark premiered after numerous delays on May 22, 2000, to near-universal critical acclaim and recognition during awards season. Sales, however, were a quarter of what GoldenEye 007 raked in. Another employee exodus followed.

Something had to change. Already, another cute, furry animal platformer game was in the pipeline, and there was absolutely nothing to distinguish Conker's Quest from any other cute, furry animal platformer in the world, up to and including Rare's own Banjo series. Then project lead Chris Seavor had an idea. A terrible, horrible, absolutely no-good idea, in the best possible way. Inspired by South Park, Conker's quest became a filthy, foul-mouthed, poo-flinging, cliché-ripping cauldron of spite unlike any other commercially released game ever made. Seavor was so proud, he voiced the drunken title character himself.

When Rare announced the change of direction, most people assumed it was a prank. On March 4, 2001, they found out different. Conker's Bad Fur Day gleefully thumbed its nose at traditional games, then blew off their pinkie toe for laughs. It also corrected many of the backtracking mistakes that plagued Donkey Kong 64, and threw in the best potty humor (sometimes literally) ever seen in a video game. Conker's depraved quest also benefited from Rare's years of experience on the N64, boasting graphics and small but telling technical advances that topped even Perfect Dark's from a year before. The hilariously profane dialogue pushed the limits of both the storage media and good taste, and critics ate it up.

Not surprisingly, Conker didn't do so well. Nintendo practically disowned the game, never listing it or mentioning it in any of their official publications. Moreover, Conker was proudly far, far outside the mainstream, and came in right at the end of the N64's lifecycle.

Despite all these factors, and the initial concerns that lead to Conker's glorious transformation, another roving 3D action-platformer staring cute anthropomorphic critters moved through development at Rare for the N64. Running on an engine similar to the one that powered The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Sabre and Krystal were the playable leads in Dinosaur Planet, and players could switch between the two by use of the SwapStone. Production was already pretty far along when a content review passed much of the finished material across Shigeru Miyamoto's desk. He instantly noticed unintended similarities between Sabre's design and that of his own Fox McCloud. Further examination revealed that with a few adjustments, it would nicely plug a glaring franchise gap in the release schedule for Nintendo's new sixth generation console.

A few modifications later, Dinosaur Island became Star Fox Adventures for the Nintendo GameCube. Critics enjoyed the Zelda-like gameplay, but some felt the wholesale departure from Star Fox's traditional flight combat genre too jarring. The lowest scores came out of Nintendo-centric outlets who felt betrayed... not for the genre flip, but because Fox McCloud's ground-based adventures became Rare's final game on a Nintendo console.

Playing Both Sides

As early as 2000, Microsoft began making overtures to have the Stampers come make games for their still-under-wraps console. In September 2002, the same month Star Fox Adventures hit stores, they made it official. The Stampers and Nintendo both sold their stakes for a combined $377 million, all the various franchise rights were untangled amicably, and Rare -- once again the official company name -- became a first party developer for the Xbox.

The deal didn't immediately pan out for everyone.

Donkey Kong Racing, an unfinished semi-sequel to Diddy's earlier racer, fell into oblivion. The only two games Rare delivered for Microsoft's big black box were Grabbed by the Ghoulies, the biggest flop in Rare's history, and Conker: Live and Reloaded, a remastered, more heavily censored port that faired even worse than the original. Meanwhile, Rare still delivered Banjo and Sabre Wulf games for the Game Boy Advance. When dev-kits became available for the Nintendo DS, the Stampers picked up a few. Despite being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, the bulk of Rare's development schedule turned to Nintendo's mobile platforms.

Microsoft let it slide. They weren't a competitor in the mobile space, and they made money from the games just the same. They even handed over It's Mr. Pants, a name they'd trademarked three years previous, so Rare could turn it into a GBA puzzler.

But when 2005 rolled around, Microsoft put Rare at the forefront of their launch title lineup for the Xbox 360. The Stampers were suddenly back on console duty, and time wasn't on their side. Rather than start from scratch, the Rare teams advanced two back-burner projects, both of which started life as GameCube titles. The first was actually set to be a flagship game for Nintendo's console, then was shelved midway through redesign for the Xbox 1.0. Kameo: Elements of Power takes a comely young elf, gives her shapeshifting powers, and sets her loose to pummel and puzzle her way through a richly designed world.

Perfect Dark Zero, chronicling the early firefights of bounty hunter Joanna Dark, made an appearance at Nintendo's Spaceworld 2000 event, but largely vanished off the radar afterwards. It was about twelve months away from completion for the original Xbox when word came down to bump it up to the 360. Its multiplayer became the test platform for Xbox Live, and the design team jumped on board the new Achievements system, setting precepts for shooter Achievements that are still copied almost verbatim in every Xbox shooter three years later.

The head start Rare had on design and production paid off. Both games were regarded as among the better launch titles for the Xbox 360, and both became million-unit sellers.

A third game, once set for the Pocket PC platform, made its way to the 360 the following year. Originally an idea of Tim Stamper's called Your Garden, a total of fifty people - many from the Banjo-Kazooie team - lead by Gregg "The Grim Reaper" Mayles spent four years molding it into Viva Pi?ata. Easily the gentlest game Rare produced in years, players raise, breed, and provide for candy-named pi?ata animals. Not that Rare didn't include a slight undercurrent; players had to respect the "doughnut of life," as some pi?atas naturally treated others as prey items.

Excitement around Viva was high. Licensing deals led to a CGI cartoon series and installations at Six Flags Mexico. Microsoft positioned Viva as the launch title for Xbox's South American debut. Back in the states, it was regarded as the best game Rare had made since the Microsoft buyout, and signaled a return to greatness. It garnered as many Interactive Achievement Awards as GoldenEye had, and found its way onto several finalist lists for Game of the Year. It didn't win any.

Sales were not impressive. Without popular support, Viva only took home a trophy for Female Vocals, and it ranked dead last in popularity polls... not because it wasn't an excellent game, but just because so few people had played it. In an interview at the San Diego ComicCon, Rare spokesman James Thomas hinted at sour feelings inside Rare when he criticized Microsoft putting all its holiday marketing muscle behind Gears of War at Viva Pi?ata's expense. It was an unusually candid disclosure for a notoriously tight-lipped company.

Just a few months later, on January 2, 2007, Tim and Chris Stamper announced they were leaving the company they'd founded twenty-five years earlier. No reason was given, other than the standard "to pursue other interests." Gregg Mayles took over as Rare's Creative Director.

Thus far, there's been no indication what the Stamper brothers' "other interests" are or will be. Eighth Wonder, the studio formed by the first group of Rare engineers to leave, vanished into obscurity without any released product, but Martin Hollis's Zoonami is still doing well, releasing puzzle games for the Nintendo DS, PSP, and the PlayStation Network. Indications are he's moving to the Wii next. David Doak and his team formed Free Radical Design, responsible for the Timesplitters series and the recent PS3 shooter Haze.

Rare itself is carrying on at full speed and continues to develop for the Nintendo DS even as it serves out first-party duties for the Xbox 360. Properties like Viva Pi?ata are headed for both platforms, while Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts will bring the platforming pair to a Microsoft console for the first time, and as an exclusive 360 title. And still a game port champion, there are rumblings that Rare is looking to straighten out enough legalese to bring Donkey Kong Country, the original Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark to Nintendo's Virtual Console. They've already brought a few old favorites to Xbox Live Arcade, including a revamped version of their very first game, Jetpac Refueled.

The legacy surrounding Rare may seem mixed, but there's no denying the Stampers and their company have left an impressive catalogue of games in their wake. It's unrealistic to expect every one to achieve greatness, but an amazing number of them did. A few are directly responsible for turning the entire industry to a new direction. Where Rare will go next and how it will fare without the brothers that led it for so long remains to be seen, but this is a company known for choosing the unusual approach, and relying on the unexpected. So it'll be fun to find out.