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Rare Tour Shows RareWare Secrets

Posted by simoniker on from the pigs-flying-as-we-speak dept.

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.

5 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What?! by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    huh? they have their own cafe it seems.

    wtf they'd need starbucks or taco for if they can afford a proper cook to make the food/coffee.

    --
    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. terrible article by TwistedGreen · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Wow, what a terrible article. It looks like it was posted mid-edit.

    And what was this?
    ...and with plans to expand Rare so drastically in the near future it becomes obvious at how committed Rare are to the Xbox and Microsoft's next generation hardware.
    What is this, a Microsoft ad? And Rare would obviously be committed to Microsoft, being owned by them and all...
    1. Re:terrible article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Wow. I think you're reading your own anit-Microsoft bias into this. Why do you think they shouldn't mention Microsoft anywhere in this article? As you pointed out, they are owned by them after all.

  3. Re:Poorly Written by FinestLittleSpace · · Score: 3, Interesting

    you're right... i nfact most of the core goldeneye team left, hence why timesplitters was so similar to GE at points. Basically, they lost a lot of the people who made rare RARE.

    It's a shame, but theyre still killer developers, regardless of the loss... just not AS killer...

  4. Refund? by superultra · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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."