All Your History: Rare Part 2 – In Demand

During the nineteen eighties, the Stamper brothers created a successful studio in their native England.  Focusing on the popular Sinclair ZedEx Spectrum platform, Chris and Tim made a number of great games that made their Ultimate label healthy profits.  The adventure game Knight Lore was one of the first to ever use isometric 3D graphics, and is considered the one that helped popularize the look.  But for all that, they decided to sell the company and start a new one.  While everybody else called them crazy, the Stampers believed that the Spectrum platform was fading out, and that a new, dedicated console from Japanese company Nintendo was the future.  Impressing Nintendo’s executives with their engineering skills and entrepeneurial spirit, the Stamper brothers secured unlimited funding from Nintendo to make games.  But while this made them commercially successful — again — they stopped being the critical darlings they’d once been.  Licensed titles and ports made them look like they were cashing in for easy money.  So when the time came to create a game for Nintendo’s new system, the Super Nintendo, they decided to show the world why they were still the best in the business.

In Demand

The Super Nintendo was a more powerful system than its predecessor, which allowed for better graphics.  However, developers only used this to make higher-resolution 2D sprites than before.  The Stampers knew that technology had advanced to the point when wildly more sophisticated models could be used, but nobody else was trying.  And so, with all the profits from their many, many NES games, they invested in the future of gaming.

They bought ultra-high-end Silicon Graphics computers to make full 3D models in motion.  While this looked great, the Super Nintendo couldn’t render high-quality models like that in real time.  The solution that Rare found seems obvious in hindsight, but at the time was mindblowing.  Instead of having the Super Nintedo render all the graphics in real time, Rare would just render out all the models and all their movements with the Silicon Graphics computers.  They then simply moved these pre-rendered graphics onto an SNES cartridge.  The result was a game that looked like a 3D experience a generation ahead of its time.

To show off the power of this method, Rare whipped up a tech demo of a boxing game.  When Rare showed this off to Nintendo’s executives, they literally could not believe it; they actually thought Rare must be hiding a high-end computer under the table, because there was no way a Super Nintendo could run those graphics.  When they finally convinced themselves that Rare was for real, Nintendo was ecstatic.  They more than just signed off on the idea, they purchased a forty-nine percent stake in Rare.  This formally turned Rare into a second-party developer, meaning that while they were still technically independent, they could only make games for Nintendo.  No more Genesis titles; from now on, Rare was the Nintendo of the West.

Now that this was the case, the Japanese powerhouse allowed Rare to pick from a number of their lesser franchises.  Of them all, the British developer chose Donkey Kong.  Kong hadn’t been seen in over ten years, but once upon a time he’d been the star of the game that introduced Mario to the world and kickstarted Nintendo’s rise to the top.  Now Rare wanted to see if it could recapture the magic, and do it with graphics nobody else had even dreamed of.  But they’d be doing it with a different name.  After their partial acquisition by Nintendo, the company became Rareware.

So it was that in November nineteen ninety-four, Donkey Kong Country released for the Super Nintendo from the freshly-renamed Rareware.  And just as the studio knew it would, the game bowled over audiences and critics alike with their seemingly impossible visuals.  But Rareware had taken it all one step further, by complementing the 3D models with fantastic art design.  The whole game had a personality all its own right down to the tiniest details, making for a fun and vibrant world that appealed to almost everybody.  The story was a simple as it was brilliant: it was the epic quest of a monkey trying to get his bananas back.  And it was varied, too, from the lush jungles to dark caverns to hidden temples.  As soon as they looked, gamers were hooked.

The gameplay itself was a sort of high-octane Mario.  Rareware specifically designed the levels so that an experienced player could barrel through without ever coming to a stop.  Everything was meant to be done at top speed.  A number of different animal mounts helped mix up the experience.  Also, since Donkey Kong and his sidekick Diddy Kong occupied the screen at the same time, two players could enjoy the adventure together.  Or, a single player could switch between the two different characters depending on how he wanted to get through the level.  Altogether, the game offered a good amount of variety that nevertheless remained tightly focused.

Despite great gameplay and unparalleled graphics, Donkey Kong Country still had a lot to compete with on its release.  By nineteen ninety-four the Super Nintendo was reaching old age.  Newer, more powerful systems like the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn were just around the corner.  Sales of the console, and games exclusively for it, fell steadily in the coming months and years, and caused great titles like Super Metroid to fall by the wayside.  But Donkey Kong Country defied the trends by selling a staggering nine million units worldwide.  Even though it came at the end of its console’s life, it became the second-best-selling game on the system.  Rareware had returned to their former glory, and then some.

Donkey Kong Country begat an entire franchise, including Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble.  Rareware also went on to create the Donkey Kong Land series for the Game Boy, a very similar franchise customized for the portable system.  There was even an animated kids’ TV show.  While none of them quite rivaled the original’s stratospheric success, the franchise became one of Nintendo’s most iconic and recognizable.  It became so big that even Nintendo’s golden goose, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, felt pressure from his bosses to make his games more like Rareware’s.  Amazing.

It was all part of the Stamper brothers’ decision to change their priorities: instead of making tons of so-so games, now they would only produce a small number of great games.  The Donkey Kong Country and Land games proved the model, but Rareware had more interests than just kiddy faire.  Indeed, the arcade fighting game Killer Instinct had released just before Donkey Kong in October nineteen ninety-four, and it was most definitely not child’s play.  It was as bloody and intense as its rival Mortal Kombat series, though most gamers proclaimed that Killer Instinct had the better gameplay.  It too featured top-notch graphics, although unlike Donkey Kong, it didn’t have to fit them onto weak hardware.  Rather, Rareware custom-designed the arcade machine to be running sixty-four-bit, outdoing even the popular PlayStation, a thirty-two-bit machine.  As everyone knew, Nintendo was planning to skip the thirty-two-bit generation entirely and come out with a sixty-four-bit system before anybody else.  Killer Instinct promised to release on that system when it launched in nineteen ninety-five.

Only problem was, the new console didn’t launch in nineteen ninety-five.  Turns out, skipping a generation was hard work, and Nintendo’s engineers needed more time to make the system.  So when Rareware ported their popular arcade game over to console, they had to go with the existing sixteen-bit Super Nintendo.  The result was, to put it mildly, underwhelming.  The beautifully rendered models were chopped all the way down to chunky sprites with low frame rates.  Still, while the graphics clearly hadn’t survived the journey into gamers’ homes, its well-built fighting mechanics had.  Despite the downgrade, it still managed to sell three million units.

Killer Instinct 2 broke into arcades in nineteen ninety-six, and was widely seen as an improvement over the original.  And fortunately, a sixty-four-bit Nintendo console did release that year, appropriately named the Nintendo 64.  However, when the sequel came to the N64 as Killer Instinct: Gold, it still managed to be a graphical downgrade.  The console just wasn’t as powerful as Rareware’s custom-built arcades.  Once again, the game still attracted a devoted following based on its solid gameplay, but it wasn’t enough to save the series.  Killer Instinct never saw another title.

Still, Rareware had moved onto the new console, and was excited by the possiblities that the new horsepower could afford.  In February nineteen ninety-seven they released Blast Corps, about robot bulldozers smashing down buildings so that a runaway truck with a nuke onboard wouldn’t hit anything.  It derived from Chris Stamper’s fervent belief that “if you knock down buildings, it will be fun.”  While an innovative concept that impressed critics, it simply didn’t catch on.  It wasn’t a flop, selling close to a million units; but for a company that had grown used to multi-million hits, it wasn’t enough.

By this time, Rareware had a number of teams working on different Nintendo 64 games, the biggest of which was a huge, colorful platformer very much in the vein of the legendary Mario 64.  But that game ended up taking a little longer than expected, and so Rareware had to fall back on its other, smaller games in the meantime.  The least exciting of these was a movie tie-in for a movie that was already two years old.  Worse, it was being made by a bunch of first-timers.  That project was almost certainly destined for disaster.

The game was GoldenEye.

Tune in next time to see Rareware at the top of its game

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