Microsoft’s late arrival to the console business meant that Xbox simply didn’t have the kind of history other platform holders were free to draw from in order to strengthen their gaming lineups. Sega and Nintendo had been fuelling playground arguments for decades by the time Xbox launched, and even newcomer Sony had a good few years under its belt, all lending more options and established IPs to their slates. In the absence of time travel technology, there’s only one way to solve a problem like this — by throwing money at it. By partnering with or acquiring studios that had that kind of storied legacy Microsoft itself was lacking, it would be able to entice fans of existing properties to come across to Xbox, something it started doing from the early days of Xbox by partnering with Sega, themselves on the way out of the hardware business and looking for new homes for their popular games. This collaboration led to new Xbox outings for popular series like Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, The House of the Dead, Toejam & Earl, Panzer Dragoon, and more, although the whole while, Microsoft was looking for something a little more… permanent.Having been one of the most respected and successful developers of the Nineties, Rare found itself in a weird place around the turn of the millennium. The talented studio had been so cosy with Nintendo that it seemed like it was only a matter of time before the Japanese giant snapped up the UK developer and made it a first-party studio, but it seems the eventual offer was too little, too late. The early 2000s saw Nintendo, Activision, and Microsoft all reportedly embroiled in a bidding war over Rare, and it would be MS that came out on top — in September 2002, Microsoft announced that it had acquired Rare for the cool sum of $375 million. With Rare came that in-built history that Microsoft was missing, with an archive of amazing games and franchises dating all the way back to the 8-bit era, when Rare was known as Ultimate (and was one of the biggest and best names in the business even back then, too). The excellent Rare Replay doesn’t even tell the full story of just how impressive the studio’s catalogue is/was… some of Rare’s best games used Nintendo characters and so rights to those remained with their parent company, while other releases like seminal console shooter GoldenEye 007 were lost to time due to other disputes, despite there being a near-complete 360 XBLA port of the game out there somewhere.Despite those few holes in the back catalogue, Microsoft still had some gaming classics to work with thanks to Rare, and immediately went about doing just that. After stumbling out of the gates with middling Xbox debut Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Rare went back to the tried and true with a remaster of late N64 favourite, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, now with added online multiplayer. Ultimately, though, poor Conker would see history repeat itself — the original N64 release was a commercial failure largely due to releasing at the tail end of the console’s life cycle, mere months before GameCube launched, with Live & Reloaded suffering the very same fate by coming out just before the Xbox 360 arrived on the scene. It wasn’t all bad news on the Rare front, mind. Since it had no stake in the handheld market itself, Microsoft allowed the team to continue working with Nintendo on Game Boy Advance and later DS games, including new games for Banjo and Sabre Wulf, remakes of two beloved Donkey Kong Country platformers, and the incredibly-named puzzler It’s Mr Pants!, which is actually a real video game that exists. Seriously, I played it. It was pretty good.Still, if it seemed like Rare wasn’t operating at full capacity, there was a good reason for that. The studio was toiling away on two Xbox 360 launch titles — Kameo: Elements of Power, originally planned for the original Xbox, and FPS sequel Perfect Dark Zero — as well as some more early titles for the new console, including the delicious life sim thing, Viva Piñata. The two launch titles were… well, not very good, perhaps a sign of the studio being stretched a little thin or suffering as more and more veterans left for pastures new, but Viva Piñata was the spark of life we desperately needed to see to revive our faith in Rare. This was it. Rare was back. With this newfound momentum, the studio launched into a ‘sequel’ (more an enhanced version, in truth) in Trouble in Paradise before reaching for the big guns to deliver what everyone wanted: a new Banjo-Kazooie game. Sadly, Rare ended up making some weird ugly kart construction game by mistake instead, and when Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts inevitably flopped hard, it looked very much like Rare might, in fact, not be back at all. Had Microsoft wasted all that money on a team that could no longer deliver the goods?A reshuffle took place shortly after to try and course-correct the struggling studio, with a new focus on the Xbox 360 Avatars introduced in the New Xbox Experience update (more on that another day…) leading logically into work on Avatar-fronted games for the new Kinect accessory. Kinect Sports and its follow-ups might not have gone down too well with critics, but they still proved some of the better experiences with the motion control add-on and sold remarkably well, being among the best-selling Kinect titles overall. With Avatars and Kinect being the sole focus for the studio, Microsoft had a new strategy for the 2013 release of Xbox One — classic Rare games, but by different studios. The first of these would be XB1 launch title Killer Instinct with experienced fighting game dev Iron Galaxy at the helm, forging the path for new life to be breathed into classic Rare IPs by dedicated studios fit for the task. It’s something we saw again with last year’s suitably brash Battletoads reboot, and it’s a smart play. Rare itself seemed rather quiet in the early XB1 days (save for the bumper retro collection that is Rare Replay), preoccupied as it was with ongoing Avatar work and familiar Kinect experiences, but all that would change in 2018 with the release of Sea of Thieves — Rare’s first traditional game in a decade.While the underlying concept of the madcap multiplayer pirate-’em-up were certainly novel, critics and players alike lamented the lack of content at launch. It was, however, the perfect kind of video game for idiots to shout at one another over on the internet, and between the boom of streamers getting in on the nautical nonsense to get millions more eyes on the new game and the ever-present Game Pass Effect, Sea of Thieves proved a huge success, pulling in over a million players in its first two days alone. Rare has been staunchly updating and improving the game in the three years since, and that persistence has paid off. It’s a totally different game today to what we had at launch, one packed with adventure and growing by the month, and now able to boast a pretty incredible 25 million players pretending to be pirates since release. It’s likely that this ongoing support for Sea of Thieves (which shows no signs of drying up and the game is still hugely popular, a mainstay on our Gameplay Chart) is at least in part behind the delays to Rare’s next project, Everwild — some kind of fantasy adventure video game (presumably) which is looking like it won’t see light of day until 2024 at the earliest. Looks lovely, though, whatever the hell it is.Okay, well that was a pretty long Rare history lesson, but it’s all important for context. You see, for years, Microsoft’s acquisition of Rare was seen as a misstep. But now, two decades on, we can see that Rare finally is back. It’s not the Rare that worked on classics like Donkey Kong Country and GoldenEye, sure, but the studio today still has that same sense of playfulness and character about it, now channeled in a slightly different direction due to Microsoft and Nintendo platforms having rather different demographics. In my opinion, that was the stumbling block with Rare’s early integration into the Xbox family, actually. Companies work in different ways, so it’s little wonder in hindsight that that effectively having Rare keep doing the same thing it had been doing for Nintendo for years wouldn’t have the same effect for Microsoft. Today, we see the true value of this acquisition, with favourites from the Rare archives being brought back to life after years of absence, while the team itself exerts a new creative muscle built up over years of doing more behind-the-scenes work. It took a while, but Microsoft finally found a way to make its new toy play nice with the others, and the huge success of Sea of Thieves really does feel like the kind of fairytale ending befitting of these ongoing Xbox20 celebrations. Next up, we’ll be revisiting the online gaming boom that came about with the launch of Xbox Live, but for now, let’s hear your thoughts on Rare. Has the studio proven its value to Microsoft? Does it have more in the tank? Why isn’t It’s Mr Pants! on Xbox? Have at it, me hearties!
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