It was a sad day in the early 2000s when Microsoft bought out childhood-memory-makers Rare Ltd, the company behind

Donkey Kong Country, Battletoads, Konker’s Bad Fur Day, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo Kazooie,

and much, much more. Since their acquisition, the company has slid into

obscurity, and while it is no secret that a major reason for that was

poor management of the developer by Microsoft, a recent issue of

Retro Gamer magazine shed a bit more light on the subject.

Reportedly, Rare had begun production on a slew of games throughout their time at Microsoft, including

Crackdown 2, Kameo 2, and a completely abandoned IP called Black Widow,

all of which had been promising in their early development. Microsoft,

however, wanted Rare to prioritize making games for their miserable

first generation Kinect. They also pushed for Rare to make the games

they’d always made, but without taking into account the audience for

those games. Namely: those who grew up playing Rare games probably were

not the ones playing Xbox games with a Kinect.

Some of the highlights of the interview with Phil Tossel are:

He spent several months working on a an early version of Crackdown 2 and has a particular affection for Black Widow, an aborted first-person shooter featuring a spider mech and an ingenious ‘jump-and-gun’ mechanic.

Coding also commenced on a sequel to Kameo. “We wanted to age it up a bit,” Phil explains. “The monsters were more grown-up and, for Kameo, we lost the googly eyes and now she could morph into an eagle. We wanted this epic feeling of looking down as she flew over this huge world.”

Kameo 2 was given the go-ahead and was looking very promising when, after a further three months in production, it was abruptly shelved. The reason? Microsoft decided to focus all of Rare’s attention to its great waving hope, the Kinect.

“I think we were handed a poisoned chalice,” he says, wearily. “We were being asked to make the games we’d always made for an audience that didn’t want those sort of games. The reason we did Black Widow, Crackdown and aged up Kameo was because we were trying to bridge that gap but Microsoft wouldn’t let us.”

All quotes from

Retro Gamer Issue 122, which you can pick up for £4.99 should you want to see the full meat of the interview.

Source: NeoGAF

No

ChannelImages

Our Verdict

Top