The Rise and Fall of Rare, the Greatest Studio Nintendo Ever Gave Away

In the late 1990s, the best video game studio in the world wasn't in Japan or California. It was in a cluster of converted farm buildings in the English countryside, surrounded by fields and cows. From that unlikely place came GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Donkey Kong Country. The studio was Rare, Nintendo's secret weapon, the crown jewel of its empire. And in 2002, Nintendo sold it, to Microsoft, its brand-new enemy, for around $375 million. And the studio that made Nintendo's finest games would never make a game that good again. This is the full story: how brothers Tim and Chris Stamper reverse-engineered Nintendo's hardware to earn near-unlimited freedom; how they bet on staggeringly expensive Silicon Graphics workstations to build Donkey Kong Country and stun the industry; how the Nintendo 64 era (GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, Conker) made Rare arguably the greatest studio on Earth; how the GoldenEye team's 1999 departure and Rare's drift from Nintendo's family-friendly style foreshadowed trouble; why Nintendo passed on buying the rest of the studio and let Microsoft snatch it; and how the magic simply drained away at Microsoft, through the talent exodus, the Stampers' 2007 exit, and the Kinect years, before a distant second life with Sea of Thieves. Nintendo didn't lose Rare. It gave Rare away. And the magic never came back. (See our GoldenEye, Super Nintendo, and Xbox videos.) This is Kilobyte Chronicles, where we tell the rise and fall of the machines and makers that shaped how we lived. Chapters (approximate, ~16 min): 00:00 The best studio in the world was in a field 01:40 Two secretive brothers 03:30 Donkey Kong Country, a technological miracle 05:30 The golden age: GoldenEye, Banjo, and more 08:00 Why Nintendo let it go 10:20 Microsoft snatches the crown jewel 12:30 The magic drains away 14:30 The great what-if SOURCES (researched from primary/authoritative sources): Wikipedia, "Rare (company)" (the Stampers/Ultimate Play the Game, Donkey Kong Country and Silicon Graphics, the N64 run, Nintendo's ~49% stake, the ~$375M Microsoft purchase in 2002, the Stampers' 2007 departure, Sea of Thieves). Retrospectives/interviews on the GoldenEye team leaving to form Free Radical (1999), Rare's post-acquisition decline, and the Rare Replay collection. If you spot a genuine error, comment and I'll pin the correction.