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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.
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.
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."