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Rare Tour Shows RareWare Secrets
Thanks to Rare-Extreme for their feature showing an uncommon tour of secretive British game developers Rare, as they note: "If you described it before as Fort Knox, nobody would blame you... The mysterious aura that surrounds Rare's inner workings has done wonders for the British developer in the past." The feature includes many pictures of RareWare's extensive office complex in rural England, and also offers a vague answer to long-standing Internet rumors regarding "a 'hot swapping' feature where players could pull out their Banjo-Kazooie cartridge while the power to the N64 was still on and jam in their Banjo-Tooie cartridge... to use the secrets found in Banjo-Kazooie in the sequel" - apparently, "it was never meant to be in the first place", never functioning properly, and not intended to be found (by Action Replay use) in the N64 cartridges.
Middle of nowhere, no starbucks, no tacobell.
No real coder could work there.
And what was this?What is this, a Microsoft ad? And Rare would obviously be committed to Microsoft, being owned by them and all...
I don't know about anybody else, but I found that article to be extremely poorly written. First off, there didn't really seem to be much information contained with the article - just some fanboy going "OMG! It's THAT GUY'S OFFICE!". Secondly, there are several points in the article where there's a paragraph repeated twice and worded differently, which confused the hell out of me until I figured out what was going on.
On the good side, I had no idea that Rare was as large as they are - they have their own cafe and motion capture studio, and that many programmers? I had always pictured them as a much smaller studio, although I suppose they've been around for long enough that they've probably outgrown that long ago.
The last thing is whether or not Rare still retains it's magic. IIRC several of the programmers from Rare left and made Free Radical and games like TimeSplitters 2 (which was critically acclaimed), so a few people think that Rare's next batch of games (now that they're owned by MS) will suck. I guess we'll see, won't we...
My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Two words for her: Yeah, right.
"an extensive office in rural England" Is this opposed to downtown England?
I hate to say it, but considering all the equipment and knowledge of RARE is unconceivable they come up with a game like "Grabbed by the Ghoulies" a bunch of british sexual references and horror jokes which are untranslatable to any other language and sub-par action cliched history which is suposedly made for 4 year olds and yet features totally unfair instant death traps (read instructions or die)? who the heck greenlighted this thing? I could have guessed this would be a poor receipt game just by reading the title on the design doc. (Im just glad they never released "kameo:elements of power" which was an even worst idea.)
MS was not amused at all with the poor sales and reviews "Ghoulies" had and the rumour is they have stopped all Rare projects (including conker) until xbox 2 (*"xbox-j") is around (they will get their second chance with perfect dark 0.) If rare wants to get their popularity back they should look back at their best selling titles like "banjo","battletoads" and of course "killer instinct" which is still being played in the arcades everywhere. Look at tecmo and how Ninja Gaiden is doing! that could have been Rare and Killer Instinct or Battletoads, is a shame really.
I wish they can get back in their feet but Im not betting any though on "perfect dark 0", call it a gut feeling.
*xbox-j: xbox custom made for the japanese market.
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This guy saw no games in development. He heard no music or voice acting. He didn't meet any of Rare's developers - just saw them pointed out in the cafe. He couldn't even take a picture of the Rare sign in the lobby. What kind of tour is this? And why the hell does Rare feel the need to be so secretive? There are much better development houses that don't feel they need razor wire and security cameras.
Completely anal developers + drooling fanboy = boring article.
Hopefully though, this article brought many of you a lot closer to Rare than ever before. What the...? the article is a bunch of pictures took from an helicopter (aparently) and a camera on the sidewalk across the street? Does these guys know that real press can actually interview this people and get access to at least a waiting room in the offices? Heck.. if you are good at it, any small magazine or website (such as theirs) can call and make an appointment with the PR guys.
But ok, I will give them that, is mathemathically closer of the view that I have right now which is 10 thousand miles away to 10 miles, thats closer. I couldnt diferentiate a cactus from a head at that range but it is closer.
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My bet is that Microsoft wishes they could get their money back.
Not that they shouldn't have known any better anyway. The decision to buy Rare always mystified me; it seems that there are so many smaller dev houses that may have been riskier, but far cheaper with potentially much greater results. I'm not even an industry insider, and I was well aware of the inter-office politics that plagued Rare in the last months before the buyout. The forum at Fatbabies was pretty much a whine-fest about office conditions inside, so it just makes me wonder if the buying of Rare was just a bet by two uppers inside Microsoft:
[NEAR WATER DISPENSER]
Unnamed Xbox Employee: "Bet you you can't buy Rare."
Ed Fries: "Bet you I can."
Face it, TimeSplitters 2 - done mostly by the old GoldenEye team ... is the best game Rare never made. Conker's was the last brilliant thing to appear out of Rare and they've got nothing impressive rolling in the hype machine. At first I was terribly bummed by the MS buyout - I was afraid it would go all Bungie on us ... but like other posters have mentioned, I don't see any great loss to the platforms I game on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm usually supportive of smaller fansites, but that's just...lame.
The "Secret Project" studio? It must be PDZ, yeah. It couldn't possibly be anything else. Despite that we know of other projects Rare is working on, and nobody knows anything about PDZ at all. And would anybody really care anyway? PD was good, yeah, but that was 4 years ago, the development team left, and all the college all-nighters are with Halo now, not GoldenEye. The world has moved on. I mean, has PDZ ever been anything else than a rumor, anyway?
I'm sure IGN could've gotten better pictures. Including ones that weren't from a half-mile away. Yeah, I know small sites have their limits, but still...
The writing was...well, everybody else has already commented on that...
The thing that bugs me the most is that they claim they have got some really big secret "exclusive" from an upcoming game that they'll post soon (see the "part II..." section)...I call bull. Sites like that never get big exclusives from upcoming games. Unless, that is, the exclusive is a promotional t-shirt.