Rare Ltd.

Rare Ltd. (formerly known as Rareware) is a British video game developer that created the Banjo-Kazooie series. They are also best known for developing some other games, including Donkey Kong Country and .

Prior to the Nintendo GameCube era, Rare was a second party developer for Nintendo, meaning all of their were exclusively published on Nintendo consoles. In September 2002, Microsoft bought the entire company from Nintendo. Since then, Rare has been a first party developer for Microsoft, and would exclusively publish their home console titles on Xbox systems, including Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Since Xbox has no portable competitor, Rare's handheld still developed some titles for the Game Boy Advance, including Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge and Banjo-Pilot. Their handheld division was shut down in 2008, leaving for no future handheld installments of Banjo-Kazooie.