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Rare Ltd.

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Current logo (2015-present).

Rare Ltd. 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 Goldeneye 007.

History

The origins can be traced back to 1982 when Tim and Chris Stamper founded Ultimate Play the Game. The studio saw early success on personal computers like the ZX Spectrum with titles like Jetpac, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf, and Knight Lore. However, the team realized that the Spectrum was only popular in the U.K. and decided to branch out into other markets. The team decided to focus on the new Famicom and created a subsidiary called Rare in 1985 to reverse engineer the hardware to learn its inner workings, something Nintendo claimed to be impossible. After impressing Nintendo with its tech demos, Rare was granted unlimited budget for developing Famicom games, now called the Nintendo Entertainment System in the PAL region. At this time, the team decided to sell the Ultimate Play the Game brand to U.S. Gold and officially renamed the whole company to Rare. A string of successful NES releases followed, including R.C. Pro-Am, Snake Rattle 'n' Roll, and Battletoads, as well as several licensed games and being outsourced for console ports of PC games.

In 1994, Rare acquired several SGI computers and used them to create a boxing game tech demo, which eventually became Killer Instinct. Nintendo was so impressed with this demo that they would purchase a 49% stake in the company, making Rare a second-party developer. Nintendo would entrust Rare with the Donkey Kong license, which resulted in the Donkey Kong Country series, as well as the Donkey Kong Land series on Game Boy. Rare would go into what many consider their "golden age" during the lifespan of the Nintendo 64, with titles likep Blast Corps, GoldenEye 007, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Conker's Bad Fur Day. Another game in development for Nintendo 64 was Dinosaur Planet alongside many projects for GameCube, but all of those titles were canceled and Nintendo asked Rare to turn Dinosaur Planet into a Star Fox game. This was done because Rare was in talks with several other companies to be bought out in full. On September 23rd, 2002, Star Fox Adventures, Rare's last game as a second party Nintendo company, was released on GameCube. One day later, Rare was fully acquired by Microsoft.

Now a part of Microsoft, Rare would make games exclusively for Xbox and PC. These titles include Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Conker: Live & Reloaded, Kameo: Elements of Power, Viva Piñata, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Rare would also collaborate with Nintendo and THQ to publish several games for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS based on their existing franchises. Rare would then almost exclusively make sports games for Kinect with the only original titles being Sea of Thieves and the upcoming Everwild, along with involvement in the reboots of Killer Instinct and Battletoads as well as the Rare Replay collection. While none of the titles under Microsoft were financial failures, none have reached the critical and financial success of their creations under Nintendo.

Relevance to Banjo-Kazooie

Rare is the creator and primarily developer of the Banjo-Kazooie franchise, having a hand in every major release. When Microsoft bought Rare from Nintendo, Rare got to keep all original IPs and assets not related to the Donkey Kong franchise, which is why Banjo-Kazooie and other Rare game appeared exclusively on Microsoft platforms. The only exceptions are the two Game Boy Advance titles, which exist because Microsoft had no direct competitor in the handheld market.

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