In 2002, Microsoft bought Rare. Rare kept its name, logo, and game series. Since then, Rare has mainly made games for Xbox consoles. These games include Grabbed by the Ghoulies (2003), Kameo (2005), Perfect Dark Zero (2005), and Viva Piñata (2006). The studio culture changed a lot, so in 2007, the Stamper brothers left Rare.
In 2010, Rare began to focus on the Xbox Live Avatar system and Kinect. Over the next few years, it released three Kinect Sports games. Other studios were allowed to use some Rare series, with Rare watching over the work, such as Killer Instinct (2013). In 2015, Rare made Rare Replay, a collection of 30 of its games, to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Its most recent released game is Sea of Thieves (2018), an online multiplayer game that still gets new content updates.
Several former Rare workers later started their own game companies. These include Free Radical Design, which made the TimeSplitters games, and Playtonic Games, which made Yooka-Laylee (2017). Rare is well known in the video game industry and has won many awards. It is also known for being a secretive company. Some Rare games, such as Donkey Kong Country and GoldenEye 007, are often called some of the best and most important games ever made. However, many have said that Rare's games have not been as good ever since Microsoft bought the company.
History
Early years (1985–1993)
Rare grew out of Ultimate Play the Game, a company that the Stamper brothers ran in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, England. Ultimate made popular games for the ZX Spectrumhome computer, such as Jetpac and Knight Lore, and became one of the biggest video game companies based in the UK. Tim and Chris Stamper thought the Spectrum was only popular in the UK and would not help the company grow, so they deemed it a "dead end". The Stamper brothers wanted to grow bigger, so they sold Ultimate Play the Game to publisher U.S. Gold in 1985 and stopped making games for the ZX Spectrum.
In 1984, Tim and Chris Stamper imported a popular 8-bit home console from Japan called the Family Computer, which they had learned about from their contacts in other countries, and immediately saw its potential. The next year, 1985, the Stampers made a subdivision of Ultimate Play the Game called Rare and made it their goal to reverse-engineer the Famicom.
Nintendo thought it was impossible to take apart and study the console to learn how it worked. However, the Ultimate Play the Game team used what they had learned to create several small test programs, known as tech demos. With the help of their American friend Joel Hochberg, who was a friend of former Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa, the Stampers were able to meet with Arakawa and show him the tech demos that Rare had made. At the time, Nintendo had a quality control measure that only allowed third-party game developers to make a certain number of games for the Famicom, but Nintendo was impressed enough by Rare that they gave the studio an unlimited budget to produce games for the system. The Famicom was eventually released in North America and Europe in the form of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
After returning to England, the team moved from Ashby-de-la-Zouch to Twycross and set up a new studio under the name Rare. Their main office was in a farmhouse called Manor Farm. They also started a company in Miami, Florida called Rare, Inc., led by Joel Hochberg, that helped Rare work with American game publishers.
Rare was one of the first Western game makers to work on games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Its first game was Slalom, a downhill skiing game. Rare then worked with several game sellers, including Tradewest, Acclaim Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Sega, Mindscape, and Gametek. Over five years, Rare made sixty games, 47 of which were for the NES while the rest were versions made for the Game Boy and Sega Genesis.
Rare gave the work of making four of its games to another company, Zippo Games, which was based in Manchester. These games included Wizards & Warriors and Solar Jetman: Hunt for the Golden Warship, the third game in the Jetpac series. Rare later bought Zippo Games and renamed it Rare Manchester. Ste Pickford, who worked at Rare in the late 1980s and early 1990s, said Rare just wanted to make as many games as it could while it had the chance. The many games brought in a lot of money, but none of them were considered that good.
When the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) was released, Rare was not ready for it at first. The company only made a few games for the new console, mostly using its most popular series at the time, Battletoads. Rare used the money it earned from its NES games to buy expensive Silicon Graphics computers, which could create three-dimensional images. This made Rare the most technologically advanced game developer in the UK and helped it become well known around the world. The company also changed its priorities. Instead of making as many games as possible, the team decided to focus on making fewer games with higher quality.
Working with Nintendo (1994–2002)
Rare used its new Silicon Graphics (SGI) computers to make a short boxing game to show to Nintendo. The SNES could not show all the SGI graphics at the same time, so Rare used the computers to make 3D pictures first, and then saved those pictures onto the game cartridge. Rare called this process "Advanced Computer Modelling". Nintendo was impressed by what Rare could do with 3D graphics. In 1994, Nintendo bought a quarter of Rare. It later increased this to nearly half the company. This made Rare a close partner of Nintendo, though Rare still ran itself and made its own decisions about which games to make.
Around this time, Rare began selling its games under the name "Rareware". Nintendo saw Rare as one of its most important game makers. Nintendo offered Rare the chance to make a 3D game using one of its own characters. The Stampers chose Donkey Kong. The resulting game was Donkey Kong Country, worked on by a team of 20 people who spent 18 months. Some of the team even went to Twycross Zoo to watch and film real gorillas. The game released in 1994 and was very successful, with critics praising the game's highly advanced visuals and artstyle. It sold more than nine million copies worldwide, becoming the third best-selling game on the SNES, and was when Rare's relationship with Nintendo had truly begun. Rare also produced two sequels, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, as well as three smaller Donkey Kong Land games for the Game Boy.
Nintendo's purchase of part of Rare let the company grow a lot. The number of workers went from 84 to 250, and Rare moved out of its farmhouse office. Rare also made a fighting game, Killer Instinct, for arcades, using its own custom-built machine. The game had been planned for Nintendo's new Nintendo 64 system, but it ended up coming out on the 16-bit SNES instead, with worse graphics. Killer Instinct sold 3.2 million copies and was followed by a sequel, Killer Instinct 2. When Killer Instinct 2 was brought to the Nintendo 64 as Killer Instinct Gold, Rare's first game for the system, the graphics had to be made worse again to fit the game onto the smaller cartridge.
Rare then made Blast Corps for the Nintendo 64. It sold one million copies, which Rare felt was not enough. At that time, Rare was split into several teams each working on a different game. A big platform game was supposed to come next, but it was delayed. Rare put out its smaller games first. One of these was GoldenEye 007, based on the James Bond film GoldenEye. It was led by Martin Hollis and made by a team without much experience. The game had started as a shooter where players could only move along a set path, inspired by Sega's Virtua Cop. The team then changed it into a first-person shooter where players could move around freely. It was the first game of that genre that Rare had made. It introduced some more elements, such as stealth, headshot mechanics and reloading. A multiplayer mode was added near the end of development. GoldenEye 007 came out two years after the film. Despite this, the game won many awards and sold more than eight million copies worldwide.
Rare then made Diddy Kong Racing, the first game it put out itself without a separate publisher. It had started out as a game about cavemen using real-time strategy, but was changed into a racing game before it came out in 1997. It was one of the fastest-selling games of its time, according to The Guinness Book of Records. The game also featured two characters, Banjo and Conker, who would later star in their own Rare games. Meanwhile, Rare was still working on the big platform game that had been delayed. It had started as a game called Dream: Land of Giants, about a boy named Edison and pirates. The main character was later changed to a bear named Banjo, and a bird named Kazooie was given a bigger role. The two characters were inspired by characters from Disney films, and Rare hoped they would be liked by younger players. Banjo-Kazooie came out in June 1998 and was very well liked. A follow-up, Banjo-Tooie, came out in 2000 and sold even more, with 3 million copies.
When Banjo-Kazooie was finished, Hollis started work on a new game straight away. It was first planned as a game to go with the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, but another company offered more money for the rights, so Rare had to come up with new characters and a new idea instead. The game put a lot of focus on lighting effects and was named Perfect Dark. Hollis left Rare to work for Nintendo 14 months into the game's development. Many other workers left around the same time to start new companies. A new team took over the game and reduced the role of lighting, turning it into a more straightforward first-person shooter. Perfect Dark finally came out in 2000, receiving very good reviews, and sold about two million copies.
Conker the Squirrel also got his own game. It started out called Conker's Quest, then was renamed Twelve Tales: Conker 64. But people said it was too friendly for all ages and played too much like Banjo-Kazooie. The team changed direction and the game became Conker's Bad Fur Day, which was shown again in 2000. Unlike Banjo-Kazooie, it was made for adults and included violence, rude language, and toilet humour. Reviewers liked Conker's Bad Fur Day, but it did not sell well since it released near the end of the Nintendo 64's life and Nintendo did little to promote the game due to its crude content.
After finishing Diddy Kong Racing, another Rare team started work on a game called Dinosaur Planet for the Nintendo 64. Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto suggested the team remake it as part of the Star Fox series for Nintendo's new GameCube machine. Unlike earlier Star Fox games, which were rail shooters, Star Fox Adventures involves Fox McCloud exploring in an open world environment, and played like a 3D The Legend of Zelda game. The game got good reviews when it came out in 2002. It was the only game Rare ever released for the GameCube.
Microsoft era (2002–present)
Over time, making games became increasingly expensive for game developers. Nintendo did not give Rare more money and did not buy the rest of the company, to the Stampers' surprise. Rare looked for someone else to buy it outright. Both Activision and Microsoft came to Rare wanting to buy it. Rare liked Activision's offer, but Microsoft offered more money. On 24 September 2002, Microsoft bought Rare for $375 million. Rare kept the characters from its own games, like Conker and Banjo, and Nintendo kept the characters it owned, like Donkey Kong and Fox McCloud. Because of this, a game called Donkey Kong Racing, which was meant for the GameCube, was never finished. About 30 workers left Rare during the change.
Microsoft did not make handheld game systems, so Rare kept making games for Nintendo's handhelds after Microsoft bought it. In August 2003, Rare and Microsoft made a deal with THQ for THQ to publish four of Rare's Game Boy Advance games, all of which had been first shown at E3 2001 in some form. These included Sabre Wulf, based on a character from Ultimate; Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge, which had first been planned for the Game Boy Color; and It's Mr. Pants!, a puzzle game that had started out as Donkey Kong: Coconut Crackers. Lastly, Banjo-Pilot was released in January 2005; the game was originally a Donkey Kong spin-off game titled Diddy Kong Pilot during its development.
In 2003, Rare put out its first game for Microsoft, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, a funny action-adventure game set in a haunted house full of monsters. It had first been planned as a game where players could move around freely, but it was made simpler to appeal to a wider group of players. It got mixed reviews and is often called Rare's worst and least popular game. At the E3 game show in 2004, a Microsoft worker said Rare had the tools to make Nintendo DS games and was working on some. Shortly after, Microsoft said the company had no plans for DS games. But in July 2005, Rare put job adverts on its website for DS game makers and said it was working on important DS games. In the end, only two Nintendo DS games were released. The first was Diddy Kong Racing DS, a remake of the Nintendo 64 game Diddy Kong Racing. It was released in February 2007. The second game was Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise, a life simulation game released in September 2008. It was the last game Rare made for a handheld console before its handheld division was closed.
In 2005, Rare made Conker: Live & Reloaded, a new version of Conker's Bad Fur Day with better graphics and a changed multiplayer mode. It got fairly good reviews, but like Bad Fur Day, it did not sell well.
The new Xbox 360 machine came out in 2005, and two of its first games were made by Rare: Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo. Perfect Dark Zero was a story that took place before the first Perfect Dark. It had first been planned for the GameCube, but was changed into an Xbox 360 game. Rare had to remove some things from it to get it finished in time. Kameo had also first been planned for the GameCube. It was a new kind of game where the main character could change shape to solve puzzles. Both games got fairly good reviews and sold more than a million copies, but people still felt let down by them.
Yet, so much of the money went towards Gears of War, which is going to sell millions anyway. It was a bit of like, "What about the other franchise?" I think we got left in the wake somewhat.
— Software engineer James Thomas, on the marketing campaign for Viva Piñata.
In 2006, Rare made Viva Piñata, a game about looking after a garden. It took ideas from games like The Sims, Animal Crossing, and Harvest Moon, and reviewers thought it was very new and clever. But it did not sell well. Some Rare workers felt that Microsoft spent too much money advertising its game Gears of War and not enough on Viva Piñata. On 2 January 2007, the founders Chris and Tim Stamper left the company. Gregg Mayles became Rare's creative director and Mark Betteridge became the studio director. That same year, Rare put out Jetpac Refuelled, a new version of Jetpac for Xbox Live Arcade.
In 2008, Rare showed that it was working on small characters for the Xbox Live service, a sequel to Viva Piñata called Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Nuts & Bolts was made by the same team that had made the first Banjo-Kazooie. Many players did not like it because it focused on building vehicles instead of the kind of platform play they expected. Rare's games for Microsoft often got good reviews but did not sell well, so Microsoft changed how the studio was run at the end of the decade. In March 2010, Rare opened a new office at Fazeley Studios in Digbeth, Birmingham. Later that year, Scott Henson, who had helped build the Xbox 360 and the Kinect, took over from Mark Betteridge as studio manager. Rare also started putting more of its work into Kinect games. Henson said that Kinect would be the main thing Rare worked on going forward.
Rare's first Kinect game, Kinect Sports, came out in November 2010. It had started out as a more detailed sports game called Sports Star, but was made simpler. Microsoft executive Don Mattrick hoped it would be for Kinect what Wii Sports was for the Wii. Some former Rare workers said the team was worried during development because of what Kinect could not do. The game got average reviews, but sold well, with three million copies sold by May 2011. Rare worked with another Microsoft studio, BigPark, to make a follow-up, Kinect Sports: Season Two.
In March 2011, Craig Duncan, who had worked on Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and the Colin McRae Rally games, was brought in as the new studio director. Simon Woodroffe, who had worked at studios including Midway Games, Ubisoft, and Sega, became the studio's creative director in April 2012. In 2013, an old Rare game, Killer Instinct, was brought back as a new game. Rare helped with it, but the main work was done by another company, Double Helix Games. Rare's character Conker also appeared in a Microsoft game called Project Spark as extra content, in a story called Conker's Big Reunion. It was cancelled in 2015.
Rare put out Kinect Sports Rivals in 2014. About 150 people worked on it, and a new game engine was built for it. The game did not sell well. After Microsoft said that Kinect would no longer be a big focus, about 15 Rare workers lost their jobs. On 10 February 2015, some former Rare workers said they had started a new company called Playtonic Games. They planned to make a new game, Yooka-Laylee, that would feel like Banjo-Kazooie. It came out on 11 April 2017 to mixed reviews.
Rare composer Robin Beanland said that 2015 would be an important year for Rare. At the E3 game show that year, Rare showed Rare Replay, a collection of 30 of its own games to mark its 30th birthday. It was released in August. It only included games that Rare owned the rights to. Rare Replay was the most pre-ordered game shown at E3 that year and got much praise when it came out. Rare also showed a new game, Sea of Thieves, a game for many players set among pirates, which was called "The Best Game That Rare Has Ever Made". The game was delayed and came out on 20 March 2018. It got mixed reviews, but sold very well. In January 2020, Microsoft said it had more than 10 million players, making it the most successful new game Microsoft had put out that console generation. The game later came out on the PlayStation 5 as well, making it the first Rare game ever on a PlayStation machine.
In 2018, Rare worked with Dlala Studios on a new Battletoads game for the Xbox One and Windows. It came out in 2020. In 2019, Rare worked with Nintendo again. Banjo and Kazooie were added as playable characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Nintendo Switch, and some old Rare games were made available on Nintendo Switch Online. In November 2019, Rare said it was making a new game called Everwild for Windows and Xbox Series X/S. By January 2020, Rare had grown steadily for five years and had more than 200 workers. In October 2024, Microsoft said Craig Duncan would become the head of Xbox Game Studios, with Joe Neate and Jim Horth taking over from him at Rare.
In July 2025, Microsoft canceled Everwild while the company did a lot of layoffs, meaning that several people no longer worked for the company. The game's director, Gregg Mayles, who had worked at Rare for a very long time, left the company in October that year.
Culture
According to Mark Betteridge, one of Rare's main goals is to make games that people enjoy, not just to make money. The Stamper brothers gave their workers a lot of creative freedom, though they would step in if a game had technical problems or was not doing well. Some workers said that working at Rare in its early days could be hard. Workers were only allowed 30 minutes for lunch and sometimes worked more than 60 hours a week. Nintendo and Rare worked closely together, and Viva Piñata designer Justin Cook called their relationship a "creative partnership". According to Henson in 2010, trying out new things is very important to Rare, which is why it focuses on new technology like the Kinect. For most of its history, Rare only made games for game machines and never for personal computers. The Stamper brothers said they preferred working on machines that were built only for playing games and that did not change much. According to Duncan in 2014, Rare would only make games with new and different ideas and would never make a plain, ordinary game using its characters.
Everybody likes to create this narrative that Microsoft are evil, but that's not the case – they were very supportive. I guess there were a few people who have since left who thought: 'I wanted to be working on this game or my pet project, and I didn't get to.' And they've kind of painted a picture that it's all Microsoft's fault.
— Gavin Price, former Rare employee and founder of Playtonic Games, about Microsoft.
Ed Fries, who led Microsoft Studios' publishing at the time of the sale, said Microsoft tried to keep Rare's way of working so that workers still felt they were part of Rare rather than Microsoft. Workers did not all agree about what it was like after Microsoft took over. Phil Tossell, the lead engineer on Star Fox Adventures, said that things slowly became more stressful and that the two companies' ways of doing things began to clash. Tossell said Microsoft slowly brought in a more formal company structure, with more performance checks and meetings, which some Rare workers found hard to get used to. Some workers did say that certain early changes were good for team spirit, such as being allowed to talk about other teams' games, use the internet, or listen to music during work. Betteridge said the change was mostly good overall, as Microsoft's money could help Rare make its games. Former Rare worker Gavin Price said some Microsoft bosses, like Phil Spencer, were supportive of Rare. Grant Kirkhope, who had written music for Rare, strongly criticised Microsoft after the sale.[bettersourceneeded] Former Xbox boss Peter Moore said he was let down by Rare's games after the sale. He said Rare workers were trying to go back to what made them great before, but that their skills were out of date and no longer suited the current market. Duncan said there were still many talented people at Rare and that the company had a bright future ahead of it.
Unlike most other game makers, Rare became known for being very private. Cameras watched the path leading to its offices in Manor Park near Twycross. Inside, the company was split into separate barns, and workers in each barn only worked on their own group's game. According to Tim Stamper:
Rare has a different philosophy. We don't really have much contact with other game development companies and we just do things the way they've evolved. We try to employ people who are great games players and games enthusiasts and they're really interested in seeing the other games we're developing in the company, so it's really a group of games enthusiasts all working together to produce the best games they can – that's Rare.
—Tim Stamper, February 2003 Video Games Daily interview
Even though it was usually so private, Rare did let some fan websites visit and tour its studio. These included Rarenet in 1999, Rare-Extreme in 2004 and again in 2009, and the website Eurogamer in 2006. In 2010, a fan website called MundoRare offered to pay for a short film about Rare's studios to mark its 25th birthday. The film would have been shared on the internet and on Xbox Live. Rare said no, telling MundoRare the film was not "on message". MundoRare later closed down, saying it could no longer support the direction Rare had taken. Alex Carlson of Hardcore Gamer criticised Rare's secrecy, saying it made the company "disconnected" from its fans and led it to make games "their fans don't want". When Duncan became head of the studio, he wanted to change this. The office was fully redesigned to make it easier for workers to share ideas with each other. The studio also became more open with its fans, even inviting them to take part in making Sea of Thieves.
In 2025, to celebrate Rare's 40th anniversary, 8BitDo released a limited edition controller for Xbox Series X and Series S featuring the Rare logo and Sea of Thieves branding. A new cosmetic hat was also added into Sea of Thieves.
Starting in 1997, a number of Rare workers left to start their own companies. The first was Eighth Wonder, which was funded by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. It closed before it finished any games.
After Martin Hollis left Rare, he worked at Nintendo for a time before starting his own company, Zoonami, which made Zendoku, Go! Puzzle, and Bonsai Barber.
Some workers from the Perfect Dark team, including David Doak and Steve Ellis, started Free Radical Design and made the TimeSplitters games. The studio was later bought by Crytek and renamed Crytek UK, before closing in 2014. Most of its workers then moved to Deep Silver Dambuster Studios. Deep Silver briefly brought Free Radical Design back from 2021 to 2023, with Ellis and Doak leading the new version of the studio. Some other former workers from Free Radical and Rare started Crash Labs, a studio that makes games for iOS devices.
Two former Rare workers, Alex Zoro and Jonny Ambrose, were among the six people who started FreeStyleGames (later Ubisoft Leamington) in 2002. The studio became known for the Guitar Hero games. After leaving FreeStyleGames, Zoro started a new company called Pixel Toys, while Ambrose left game making to focus on car sculptures through a company called Ambrose Auto Art.
Chris Seavor, the director of Conker's Bad Fur Day, started a company called Gory Detail with fellow Rare worker Shawn Pile. Gory Detail made Parashoot Stan for mobile devices and The Unlikely Legend of Rusty Pup on Steam.
Four former Rare workers started Starfire Studios, which made Fusion Genesis, a game for Xbox Live Arcade published by Microsoft Game Studios. Another group of former Rare workers started a mobile game studio called Flippin Pixels.
Former Rare worker Lee Schuneman led Lift London, a studio owned by Microsoft.
Phil Tossell and Jennifer Schneidereit started Nyamyam and made Tengami.
Playtonic Games was started by several former Rare workers in 2014. They are best known for the Yooka-Laylee games, with the first game being made to feel like a new Banjo-Kazooie.
Rare founders Chris and Tim Stamper later joined FortuneFish, a mobile game company started by Tim's son, Joe Stamper. Their first game was That Bouncy Thing! The Rubbishiest Game Ever for Android.
Chameleon Games was started in 2019 by several former Rare workers, including Omar Sawi, Kevin Bayliss, and Richard Vaucher. The studio made Tamarin, a 3D action platform game, for PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. The game was made to feel like a new Jet Force Gemini, and its music was written by David Wise.
Rare has also started many games that were never finished. Some of these were announced before they were stopped. They include Dream: Land of Giants, which became Banjo-Kazooie; Perfect Dark Core, first planned as the follow-up to Perfect Dark; Black Widow, an open world game where the player controls an eight-legged robot; Sundown, which had a mode where players fight off waves of enemies; The Fast and the Furriest, a racing game with cartoon animal characters; Tailwind, an action game about helicopters; Urchin, a game in the style of Fable that started after Conker: Live & Reloaded was finished; Ordinary Joe; Savannah, a Kinect game; Kinect versions of Wii Fit and Professor Layton; a follow-up to Diddy Kong Racing; a follow-up to Kameo; and Everwild, an action-adventure game with elements of a god game.
Awards
Rare has won many awards. It won a BAFTA award for "Best UK Developer" for GoldenEye 007. In 1997, the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly named Rare the "Most Promising Game Company", pointing to how many big, important games it had made for the Nintendo 64. In 2000, Rare won the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Moving Images Award for Perfect Dark. Tim and Chris Stamper were named Development Legends at the 2015 Develop Industry Excellence Awards. Rare was named one of Gamasutra's Top 30 Developers of All Time and was ranked 36th on IGN's list of the best video game makers. The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum put on a show about Rare's work in 2018.
