Who Killed Rare?
Through a locked gate, down a winding path and by a still pond a few miles outside of the leafy village of Twycross, England, a bonsai tree stands. It was a gift given to Rare by Shigeru Miyamoto, the most famous game designer in the world, as a thank-you for the game developer’s critical and commercial success in creating games for Nintendo, the most famous game maker in the world.
For Rare’s staff arriving to work at 8:30 sharp each morning, it has served as a reminder of the company’s heritage, of who they are, of how lucky they are to be a part of something so admired, so rare. An unassuming trophy of past glories, it’s also an inspiration for future goals, a symbol carefully cultivated to weather trends, transcend fashions; rooted, a gnarly resolution.
On 20th of September 2002, Microsoft paid $375 million for this bonsai tree and all that it symbolised: creative excellence, technical mastery, innovation, originality, soul and the precious fingerprints of Nintendo. The fledgling Microsoft Game Studios, desperate to acquire world-class talent that could help establish its game console, saw in that tree everything it desired to become.
10 years later and Bill Gates is yet to plant a bonsai tree in Rare’s once-fertile grounds.
In that time Rare’s critical and commercial success has tumbled, the studio’s games struggling to live up to their creator’s name. Two years after the acquisition, Chris and Tim Stamper, the brothers who founded the company in 1982, departed into “exploring new opportunities” obscurity. Faithful fans became disillusioned while, apart form a couple of notable exceptions, the developer’s new, scattershot directions have failed to inspire loyalty or passion in the next generation of players and the next again.
What went wrong? And who – or perhaps what – is to blame?
Elements of Power
“Microsoft and Rare was a bad marriage from the beginning. The groom was rich. The bride was beautiful. But they wanted to make different games and they wanted to make them in different ways.”
Martin Hollis joined Rare in 1993, a year before Nintendo bought a 49 per cent stake in the developer. His first project was the coin-operated Killer Instinct, an arcade machine for which he coded an entire operating system. Following the Nintendo buyout Hollis, a coding genius, created Goldeneye, laid the blueprint for Perfect Dark and finally left for America to help develop the GameCube console. His time at the company coincided with what many view as its golden years, a period during which Rare simultaneously broke new ground and perfected old with a string of blockbusters stamped with the Nintendo seal of approval.
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Rare’s Twycross headquarters.
“Rare was always looking East at Japanese and Nintendo’s games in particular, with their open-hearted childlike vibrancy and playfulness,” explains Hollis. “Meanwhile, Microsoft had a US-centric style to its games, a flair of machismo and testosterone. For the first decade after the Microsoft sale the major problem for the creativity of the studio has been direction. Looking in from the outside it felt as if neither Microsoft or Rare could work out where it was headed.”
From the inside the studio’s gates, too, the changes to Rare introduced by Microsoft tampered with the recipe of the company’s success, leaving teams feeling disorientated, and even downcast.
“The changes were imperceptible at first, but became increasingly rapid as time went on,” says Phil Tossell. Hired by Hollis in 1997, he cut his teeth on Diddy Kong Racing before working as lead engineer on Dinosaur Planet (which later became Starfox Adventures). He was present at the company through the Microsoft acquisition, and was promoted to Director of Gameplay in 2009 when he oversaw development of Kinect Sports. “For me personally, the atmosphere became much more stifling and a lot more stressful,” he says. “There was an overall feeling that you weren’t really in control of what you were doing and that you weren’t really trusted either.
“There was also a gradual introduction of certain Microsoft behaviours that crept into the way we did things: lots more meetings, performance reviews and far more regard for your position within the company,” he said. “While these weren’t necessarily good or bad per se, they began to erode the traditional Rare culture and way of doing things. Many of the people who’d been there a long time found these changes extremely hard to accept.”
Trouble in Paradise
That culture appears to be the secret of Rare’s success in the 1990s, a unique setup in game development at the time. “The general feeling at the time was that, as a company, we were invincible and that anything was possible,” says Tossell. “It was incredible to be surrounded by so many talented people, all of whom were single-mindedly focused on making the best games that we could. I never realised it at the time, but I think what was most unique was the sense of freedom and responsibility that the Stampers gave to each team. They trusted us to get the job done. As a result, you always felt like you wanted to do the absolute best that you could for them.”
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Martin Hollis.
Hollis agrees: “Mainly Tim and Chris left us to our own devices. They recognised the talent and left teams to make their game, intervening only when a team was broken or under-performing in their judgement. This was a wise move as it left us self-motivated. I’d say 70 or 80 per cent of the employees were super energised and focused on producing something incredible. I don’t recall anyone saying so, but I’m certain it was at the back of all our minds that we were privileged to be in that situation, amazingly well funded, great colleagues, and a sweetheart relationship with Nintendo.”
“That’s not to say that it was easy,” says Tossell. “The hours were long and the environment was very competitive: not in the sense of team members competing with each other, but competition between teams. I think this was a deliberate ploy by Tim and Chris to push each team further and harder.
“The old site was a converted farmhouse and by the time I joined there were already around 100 staff and fitting all the cars in was literally like completing a jigsaw puzzle. Each team was in a separate barn and their access key only worked on their barn. It’s been so long that I can’t actually remember which barn I was in, but we were upstairs and below was the Banjo-Kazooie team. Work always began at 9 on the dot. Lunch was just 30 minutes and then it was back to work. Most days I would work until around 10pm, but it really depended on what you were doing at the time. It wasn’t unusual to do 60 or more hours’ overtime a week.”
Read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here