Even Rare feel the pinch (Sabreman and Jetman become jobseekers!)
Rare, formerly Ultimate: Play the Game, are, like so many other British companies and organisations, making staff redundant:
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/rare-makes-staff-cutbacks
The gist of it is that they're replacing full time people with contractors, and moving more to a business model of outsourcing projects to different groups. Given how badly that idea fared when they outsourced the XBox 360 port of Perfect Dark (which emerged with bad controls, some appalling bugs, and far too limited online options, all but killing off interest in the game in the 360 community) I don't expect that Rare's future will be too stellar. Although to be fair, they've not been too great for a long time now.
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/rare-makes-staff-cutbacks
The gist of it is that they're replacing full time people with contractors, and moving more to a business model of outsourcing projects to different groups. Given how badly that idea fared when they outsourced the XBox 360 port of Perfect Dark (which emerged with bad controls, some appalling bugs, and far too limited online options, all but killing off interest in the game in the 360 community) I don't expect that Rare's future will be too stellar. Although to be fair, they've not been too great for a long time now.
Post edited by ewgf on
Comments
Can't see them doing much in the future apart from Kinect krap though.
Yeah, that's all they seem to be doing these days. The recent article in Retro Gamer pretty much said that all they will be doing for the forseable future is working on Kinect and those Avatar things. Shame really as a once great company is reduced to turning out shovel-ware :(
I do think because of how things have gone, a lot of UK talent has been suppressed and the "gold mine" days are really gone.
Never liked any ultimate games and never liked any rare games. So a pretty consistent company as far as I'm concerned!
when people say rare i tend to think of the N64 days, and when they say ultimate i think of the speccy days. :-)
My wife likes Dance Central, but I think the general consensus is that these two are the best titles so far.
Nothing they've done has particularly grabbed me since then, no. In fact, even though some of their games have gotten reasonably high acclaim, the only one that seems to have stood the test of time, as in is still played loyally and still talked of fondly, is Viva Pinata. Although it's only been out for four years, so the phrase 'test of time' might seem stretched here, plus they haven't done too many games since leaving Nintendo, but it is a fact that so many of their older games are still revered, at least insomuch as any games can be said to be revered.
I mean, games like Jetpac, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf (which I hate, but that's just me), Knightlore, Battle Toads, Snake Rattle 'n' Roll, Donkey Kong Country 1 and 2, Blast Corps, Jet Force Gemini, Banjo Kazooie, and Goldeneye, amongst others, are considered by many to be amongst the best games ever made, and are still widely played by users of those machines. But nothing from 2002 onwards (they went from being a second party supporter of Nintendo to a second party supporter of Microsoft in 2002, supposedly involving Microsoft paying $375 million for the privilege) seems to be anywhere nearly as fondly regarded as the games I mentioned. Even Viva Pinata doesn't seem to generate the forum traffic that the most popular pre-2002 Rare games did.
Yep. I think that their best run was by far their N64 days, as I never liked their two XBox 1 games much, and though I did like their SNES games (well, the Donkey Kong Country games, what else did they do on the SNES?), I thought that their N64 games were the companies peak (and the best of their N64 games still represent the peak of any sort of video gaming, if you ask me). I never saw their games on the NES/Gamecube and other machines. Oh, I did see some of their C64 games, but I wasn't impressed...
You're just saying that for attention. Truth is, you love Jetpac, Underwurlde, Goldeneye and Conker's Bad Fur Day as much as anyone else, but you just want to be noticed so you're posting for shock value. ;)