With the impending release of Donkey Kong Country Returns on the Nintendo Wii, gamers that are old enough will think back to 1994 when the original Donkey Kong Country was released on the Super Nintendo to widespread acclaim. At a time when hype was beginning to build about the impending release of the Sony Playstation, here was a game that produced 3D graphics on a largely 2D system. Cue record sales (8 million copies worldwide, only behind Super Mario World that game pre packaged with the console) and positive reviews.
The company that produced the game for Nintendo was a British based company called Rareware. Rare had been developing games for years before their first major success, but this revolutionary platformer propelled them into the spotlight. Formed in 1982 by brothers Chris and Tim Stamper, they signed a deal with the Nintendo back when the game was being developed that ensured they would be exclusively making games for the Japanese companies systems, and enjoyed a prolonged period of success.
An arguably better crafted sequel to it's breakthrough game followed, along with a second. Masterpieces such as Goldeneye 007 and it's sequel Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing, Donkey Kong 64 and the vastly under-rated Blast Corps and Jet Force Gemini, all published for the Super Nintendo's successor, the Nintendo 64, were just some of the highlights that hit the shelves when trends were beginning to shift away from cartridge based gaming and Nintendo were starting to lag behind Sony in the sales war.
This decline continued into the new millenium with the next home console, the Gamecube. A lack of third party games and the refusal to accept that gamers were beginning to demand more from their system then merely playing games meant that Nintendo faced the possibility of going the same way as Sega and becoming a games developer, rather than producing hardware too.
During this decline in 2002, Microsoft, a relatively new player in the home console market with it's Xbox, paid a record £375 million to aquire a 100% stake in Rare.
Since the American giant took over control of Rare, results can best be descibed as mixed. The long awaited Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo: Elements of Power, both launch games for it's second effort, the Xbox 360, were released to lukewarm reviews and the company's most recent offering, Kinect Sports, is no more than a demo disc for the next technology. Meanwhile, Nintendo are again enjoying an extended period of success, with the Wii outselling rival consoles and it's handheld DS dominating sales against Sony's PSP.
So, what went wrong for Rare? The key elements seem to lay in a number of key employees leaving the company in 2000, just before Perfect Dark was released. A number of the team who had worked on 1997's Goldeneye 007 (a game that can't claim to have invented the first person shooter genre, but is rightly heralded as one of the finest), left and formed Free Radical Design, They later went on to develop the succesful Timesplitters franchise, spiritual sequels in all but name.
One other aspect that can explain the demise of this once great developer could be the change in gaming itself. With a shift towards adult and more serious gaming evident when one looks at the shelves of game stores today, it could be argued that a lack of innovation is the result of multiple sequels to long established and little-changed franshises. Publishers such as Activision and Electronic Arts make the majority of their profits off of a select few titles, such as Call of Duty and FIFA, reducing chances of lesser known games getting any publicity or shelf space.
Nintendo retained the rights to the Donkey Kong Franchise and the latest game is already being touted as a potential award winner. It has been developed by American based company, Retro Studios, who itself was ironically purchased by Nintendo back in 2002 and has since re-invented the Metroid franchise. It is pleasing to see at least one company still developing revolutionary and innovative games, just like Rare did back when games didn't take themselves so seriously...
No comments:
Post a Comment