All Your History: Rare Part 4 – Invaluable

As the nineties came to a close, British developer Rareware was one of the most high-profile studios in the world.  For years they’d been generating hits for their part-owners, Nintendo.  Then out of left field, they produced the movie tie-in GoldenEye.  Made by a bunch of first-timers, the title was supposed to be a minor release and a low performer.  Instead, it became one of the Nintendo 64’s signature games, and landmark achievement in the history of the shooter genre.  This was closely followed by Banjo-Kazooie, a family-friendly adventure that also obtained a loyal following.  As the new millennium dawned, everything seemed to be rolling right along.  But as it turned out, the next few years would see the end of Rareware’s golden age.

Invaluable

After GoldenEye’s unexpected success, the next game from that team was highly anticipated.  It would of course be another shooter on the Nintendo 64, but this time, it wouldn’t be constrained by somebody else’s movie.  Rather, this would be Rareware’s own original IP, in which they could do anything they felt like.  Game director Martin Hollis wanted to push the boundaries of lighting in games, by making light and darkness central gameplay mechanics.  From this concpet, came the name: Perfect Dark.

But not everything on Dark was perfect.  Fourteen months into the project, Hollis left Rareware behind.  The only public statement on this came from Hollis, who said he and the company were each “asking for more than the other could give.”  Still, the split didn’t spill any bad blood, since Rareware co-founder Chris Stamper then recommended Hollis to Nintendo of America.  Hollis would go on to help design their next console, the GameCube.  However, his departure from Rareware had set off an avalanche effect.  Not long after, two other GoldenEye veterans, David Doak and Steve Ellis, left Rareware as well.  They would go on to form Free Radical Design, which later made the Timesplitters series.  With the team leads suddenly missing, the game, appropriately, went dark for a while.  It wouldn’t be heard from again for years.

But Rareware always had multiple projects going on at once, and Perfect Dark’s woes didn’t affect the other teams.  In October nineteen ninety-nine, Jet Force Gemini released for the Nintendo 64.  The game was an action-shooter, that combined open-world exploration with platforming and combat.  It gave players the ability to switch between first- and third-person on the fly, which allowed them to seamlessly move between the shooting and the platforming.  And true to Rareware’s reputation, the different worlds were huge and beautiful and wonderfully varied.

The story involved our heroic astronauts trying to save helpless Tribals from invading alien insects.  Rescuing these Tribals became the central tenet of the experience.  However, the game would only save players’ progress once they had found every single Tribal in an area.  Since the game also featured quite a bit of backtracking through old levels, many thought that Rareware was just doing whatever they could to extend game time.  The controls, too, were broadly considered to be clunky and unresponsive.  In the end, Jet Force Gemini never reached the heights of Banjo-Kazooie or GoldenEye, its two most obvious influences.  Still, as with practically every Rareware title, it did gain its own devoted following.

Only two months later, Rareware also swung Donkey Kong 64 onto shelves.  The game proudly brought the ape that had made the studio’s reputation into a 3D open environment.  In fact, it was so big, that it was the first game to require the N64 memory expansion pack, which they wisely bundled with the game.  The pack added four entire megabytes to the system’s available RAM, which was a one hundred percent increase.

The result was was a platformer that had more content in it than any other game on the system.  As with Jet Force Gemini, it revolved around collecting important items.  Along the way, Kong and his friends would fight bad guys and solve puzzles.  As gamers had come to expect, DK64 had a variety of levels and environments to explore.  It also contained a number of mini-games that mixed up the standard platforming experience, everything from navigating a maze to riding a mine cart.  It even had multiplayer somewhat akin to GoldenEye.

While it didn’t do anything wildly different from Banjo-Kazooie, it just had more of it.  More levels, more acres, more mini-games, more environments, and more characters.  The graphics, however, weren’t mind-blowing, even with the memory expansion.  They were top-of-the-line, but they didn’t push any boundaries.  This late into the N64’s life cycle, there just wasn’t much more the system could physically do.  Still, the tight controls and endless variety made for another solid game from Rareware.

Meanwhile, the Perfect Dark game was nearing completion, with a new direction under a new team.  The light and dark mechanics had been effectively removed.  So instead of shooting light bulbs to sneak through a level under cover of darkness, now the players would pretty much just blast through the levels, very much in the vein of GoldenEye.  Still, being “like GoldenEye” could hardly be considered a bad thing.  It released in May 2000 to fantastic hype.

The story was a little out there, involving corporate superspy Joanna Dark and her adventures fighting against and alongside aliens to defeat another coporation.  Still, the crazy story was wrapped around the same controls and mechanics that had made GoldenEye such a monster.  Critics generally loved it, citing especially its deep customization options and fantastic multiplayer suite.  It was the kind of game that players could come back to for months to come.

But for all that hype and praise, when all was said and done, Perfect Dark only sold a quarter what GoldenEye had.  To be fair, that was still a solid two million units; and obviously, GoldenEye had James Bond’s good name to piggyback off of.  Also, the Nintendo 64 was reaching old age, and a game released exclusively for it faced an uphill battle against shinier titles for newer systems.  Still, most observers had expected Joanna Dark to sell a lot closer to Double-Oh Seven.  In the end, despite the glowing praise, it was hard not to look at Perfect Dark as a disappointment.

Worse, after Perfect Dark was completed, yet another mass resignation hit the studio.  As per usual, no reason was ever publicly disclosed, but by now it looked like the Stamper brothers had lost control.  Once the two most respected studio owners in Britain, Chris and Tim now looked like they might be running their own company into the ground.  Of course, the brothers stuck to their famous secrecy, and didn’t say a word.  Rareware pressed on.

March two thousand one saw a cute fuzzy animal platformer!  Another one!  As a point of fact, the team behind Conker’s Bad Fur Day had struggled to stand apart for a while.  There was nothing particularly different in their game from Banjo-Kazooie or Donkey Kong 64.  So, the team made the daring decision to make a cute fuzzy animal game for adults instead of kids.  To that end, they went for broke.  Conker became the most foul-mouthed, disgusting, hard-drinking, womanizing, all-around terrible cute fuzzy animal imaginable.  And it didn’t shy away from toilet jokes.

Certainly, this differentiated the squirrel from the bear and the monkey.  It also aggressively went against Nintendo’s family-friendly image, which even GoldenEye had never tarnished.  The hope was that by producing something so wild and unexpected, Conker would make a big splash on the marketplace.  After all, what else out there even came close?

Sadly, the plan backfired.  Nintendo liked their image just as it was, and so did not promote the game much.  Despite some genuinely positive reviews, which praised the game’s solid mechanics, Conker failed to gain much word of mouth.  And on top of that, Conker was rated M for Mature, making the age of its audience seventeen and above, and apparently the seventeen-plus crowd wasn’t interested by fuzzy animals and toilet humor.  It all ended up as the single biggest flop in Rareware’s storied career, selling a pathetic fifty-five thousand units in a month.

It was a sad way to close out Rareware’s involvement with the Nintendo 64.  But with Nintendo’s new console, the GameCube, on the horizon, the time had come to move on.  Their first game for it didn’t come out until September two thousand two: Star Fox Adventures.  It had actually been another N64 game at first, an original IP called Dinosaur Planet.  It was about a planet.  With dinosaurs.

However, when an early build of the game crossed Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s desk, he had an idea.  The GameCube didn’t have a game yet for one of his franchises, Star Fox.  Seeing the similarities between his franchise’s style and that of Dinosaur Planet, he pushed to have the game reskinned as a Star Fox game, and revamped for the new console.  And so it was.

But when gamers finally got their hands on Star Fox Adventures, they found that it didn’t play anything like Star Fox games of old.  Where the earlier titles were legendary space combat games, Adventures was a ground-based open-world experience.  Like other Rareware games, it had a great amount of variety and tight controls.  Like other Rareware games, it had players running around different environments looking for items.  And like other Rareware games, critics praised it for its top-to-bottom quality and fine level of polish.  Despite the somewhat derivative design, Rareware had done it again.

As it turned out, for the last time.  After Nintendo had acquired a forty-nine percent stake in Rareware, the studio had done nothing but deliver solid gold in the form of groundbreaking and system-defining games.  But now, with development costs on the rise, the developer wanted additional capital.  Nintendo didn’t want to give it.

A software company in Redmond did.

Tune in next time to see Rare switch teams

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