Rare

Among British game studios, Rare holds a privileged position — it is a company that managed to squeeze more out of Nintendo's consoles than anyone expected. For retro players, Rare is synonymous with technically astonishing, playful, and often slightly zany games that defined the SNES and Nintendo 64 era. Whether it was pre-rendered graphics that looked like they came from another planet on a sixteen-bit console, or sprawling 3D worlds full of collectibles and absurd humor, Rare had its own unmistakable signature. Their gorilla in a tie and the bear with a bird in his backpack remain among the most beloved characters of the classic era to this day.

History

Rare's roots reach back to 1982, when brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, together with John Lathbury, founded the studio Ultimate Play the Game in Leicestershire, England. Under this label they released acclaimed games for the ZX Spectrum home computer, among them the cult Jetpac and Knight Lore. In 1985 the Stamper brothers founded a new company — Rare — and focused on the emerging console market, specifically on Nintendo.

Rare became one of the few Western studios that Nintendo fully trusted. In the era of the eight-bit NES they produced dozens of games, among which the relentlessly difficult action classic Battletoads from 1991 stands out. The real turning point, however, came in 1994 with Donkey Kong Country for the SNES. Thanks to the technique of pre-rendered 3D models converted into two-dimensional graphics, the game looked incredible by the standards of the time. It became a huge commercial hit and gave rise to an entire trilogy — Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! — which brought the series to perfection.

With the arrival of the Nintendo 64, Rare entered its golden era. Blast Corps (1997) entertained with its demolition of obstacles, the racing Diddy Kong Racing (1997) added a dragon and a battle mode to the go-karts, and in 1998 came the masterpiece Banjo-Kazooie — a colorful 3D platformer that remains among the peaks of the genre to this day. The studio did not forget more action-oriented tones either: the sci-fi shooter Jet Force Gemini (1999) showed that Rare could handle other registers too. It then carried its feel for detail to handheld consoles with titles such as Donkey Kong Country and Conker's Pocket Tales for the Game Boy Color.

Key figures

The soul and the head of the studio were always brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, who set the creative and business direction from the Ultimate days all the way to the peak of the Nintendo 64 era. Tim Stamper was renowned for his design sense and the visual side of the games.

One cannot overlook composer David Wise, whose soundtracks for the Donkey Kong Country series — especially the atmospheric tracks from the second installment — rank among the most respected in the history of game music and still have devoted fans today. Among the studio's prominent figures was also Gregg Mayles, lead designer of Banjo-Kazooie and other key titles, who works at Rare to this day and has become one of its most enduring legends.

Transformations and transfers

Rare's fate was fundamentally changed by the year 2002. Microsoft bought the studio for roughly 375 million dollars and moved it from the portfolio of Nintendo's collaborators under the wing of the Xbox brand. It was one of the most debated deals in the history of the industry — until then Nintendo had held a large stake in Rare, and fans feared what would become of the beloved studio. Some of the key figures soon left; some former employees later founded the studio Playtonic Games, which carried on the spirit of Rare's classic platformers with the game Yooka-Laylee.

The Stamper brothers stayed at Rare for some time after the acquisition, but definitively left it in 2007. That closed the era in which the studio was run by its founders.

The present

Rare exists in 2026 as well and still belongs to Microsoft, today under the Xbox Game Studios division. In recent years it has been made famous above all by the online pirate game Sea of Thieves, which has built a large and loyal community. The studio also recalled its rich past with the retro collection Rare Replay (2015), which gathered dozens of classic titles from the Ultimate days onto a single disc.

After years of preparation, Rare also returned to its own iconic brand — with the fantasy action game Everwild, though its development was accompanied by a series of delays. For those who remember, Rare remains above all the studio that managed to coax miracles out of Nintendo's hardware and create characters and worlds that players loved for life. And even though today's Rare belongs to a different owner and makes different games, its golden era lives on in everyone who ever collected all the golden bananas or got lost in the music of underwater caves.