Rare

Rare's current logo.

Rare, also called Rare Limited, Rare Coin-It, and Rareware, is a British video game developer founded in 1985 by brother Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper. The company has developed around 100 games, including several popular franchises like Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, James Bond games, Banjo-Kazooie, Killer Instinct, Wizards & Warriors, and Perfect Dark.

The company began just prior to the brothers selling their first company, Ultimate Play the Game, because they wanted to leave the home computer market and break into the console market. They reversed-engineered the Famicom and put together a tech demo for Nintendo who was so impressed, they signed a contract with Rare to begin developing games with an unlimited budget. This began a close partnership with Rare and Nintendo that would last decades. Rare immediately began working on several games for Nintendo and opened an office in the USA — Rare, Inc. — in preparation of the Nintendo Entertainment System. But Rare didn't just make games for Nintendo, in addition to their pet project games, Rare also contracted themselves out to various publishers, often as ghost developers, making loads of licensed games, most of which were of low quality. Rare cemented their partnership with Nintendo even further in the mid-1990s making them a second-party developer, and they asked to reboot the Donkey Kong series, which they did to great acclaim. This partnership lasted through the the Nintendo 64 era, but Nintendo never offered to officially buy the company, and Rare searched for buyer, and both Activision and Microsoft fought to buy them, ultimately with Microsoft winning, and Rare became a first party Microsoft developer in 2002 for the Xbox. Although Rare is now owned by Microsoft, they continue to work with Nintendo occasionally for select titles.

Rare has worked with many different publishers over the years including Nintendo, Microsoft, Tradewest, Milton Bradley, Acclaim, LJN, GameTek, THQ, Mattel, Epyx, Ultra, and Titus.

Personal

When I was most interested in video games, I didn't care about the companies that developed them. However, as I began to look back on many of the games that were most influential to me, I began noticing trends. Although none of Rare's games ever made it on my list of favorites, I still ended up playing a lot of them, and owning a handful. I also appreciate how inventive Rare has been, often making games that broke the mold.

Games

These are the games Rare worked on that are important to me. For all games developed by Rare see the category.

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  Battletoads

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  Diddy Kong Racing

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  Marble Madness

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  Wizards & Warriors

Television

Characters from some Rare games appears in The Power Team, a cartoon series featuring the games published by Acclaim.

Media

Documents

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  Interview in Nintendo Power.

Logos

Although Rare's name was included on most of the games they developed, they didn't start branding themselves until 1991.

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  1991-1994.

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  1994-2003.

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  2003-2010.

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  2010-2015.

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  2015-present.

Links