A History of Rare
Hmm, with all the Rare articles I’ve been doing lately, it would seem like Rare completely stopped making games! However, I decided to do this article to offer you some background on Rare, and their colorful history with Nintendo. Besides Nintendo’s time-worn Japanese business partners, such as Capcom and Midway, Rare was considered to be one of Nintendo’s most influential gaming development houses.
Rare arose at a time when Nintendo was still virtually unheard of. Nintendo had just introduced the new NES into a defunct video game market in America, and R.O.B, the machine to perpetuate NES sales, at the 1985 Summer CES in June. One of the attendees happened to be Joel Hochberg, a living legend of the video game industry. He had started out as a repairman in 1956, and worked his way up to an executive position at Allied Leisure. At the time he had had over 27 years in the gaming industry.
During one of his many flights in and around Europe with Allied Leisure, Hochberg visited a trade show. There he met a brother team, Tim and Chris Stamper. Chris, at 19, was simply a genius at electronics, and was working at a company called Zilec, which, coincidentally, was in partnership with Allied Liesure. His brother, Tim, was still in school at the time.
“There’s a dispute about this. Time doesn’t agree with me. But I’m almost positive, unless that was his charming personality I’m thinking of, there was an ATE show-Amusements Trade Exhibition Show. Chris attended it a member of Zilec. I attended it as an independent, and Tim was there as an interested individual without any direct association. Very young guy. And I was very taken aback because here was a young man, very bright, very set in respect to what he thought a very good, successful product should look like, what it should represent on screen.”
Joel Hochberg
However, by this time Allied Leisure had been purchased, and Hochberg was keen on starting his own game company in the booming international gaming market. The Stampers also wanted to leave Zilec and start their own company. After much discussion, Hochberg decided to form a partnership with the Stampers. The Stampers created a game company called Ashby Computer Graphics, a company which published games for the Sinclair Spectrum, a very popular, small computer that did well in Europe, but not in the U.S. One of the first games the Stampers created for the Sinclair was JetPac. JetPac did extremely well, selling 300,000 games to the computer’s userbase of 1 million.
Meanwhile, Hochberg was in Japan. He saw the Famicom craze that was sweeping Japan, and he sent over a system to the Stampers to see what they thought of it. The Stampers’ initial reaction wasn’t so positive. The Stampers’ didn’t want to deal with an obscure Japanese company, and they felt that the lucrative game market was in computers, not a standalone video game system. However, they agreed to make games for the console, providing that Nintendo start shipping the Famicom to the United States and Europe.
As well, the Stampers’ also needed system specifications and a license to start making games for the NES. Hochberg was familiar with Nintendo, and he set up an appointment with Minoru Arakawa in Washington D.C. to form a partnership with them.
_“I contacted Nintendo and found that they were not completely interested in sharing the technical specs with us. My question to Mr. Arakawa was, “Why?” He said, “You have to prove that you have the technical expertise,” which was not a bad answer.” Chris spend a good deal of time, practically six months, reverse engineering the hardware and then proceeding to do for me an audiovisual display, very simple, but utilizing graphic and other capabilities of the hardware that would show what we could do. We really weren’t interested in giving Nintendo a product; we were interested in giving Nintendo a view of what could be done.
When I sent that off to Nintendo, Mr. Arakawa said, “I like what I see, Now please do a game.” But he still did not give us the technical specs at that point.”_
Joel Hochberg
“Joel came to me and I said, “if you are so good, why don’t you make a game without tools?” It was a good test.
Minoru Arakawa
“I reverse engineered the NES. I had an understanding of the coin-op hardware that was out there, so I had a very good idea what the Nintendo actually contained.” We got about 99% correct. There were just a few things we didn’t know about. But the interesting thing was the stuff that we discovered in the machine that was not documented. That instantly gave us an advantage that other developers didn’t have.”
Chris Stamper
When Nintendo would eventually let loose into North America, Rare would remain one of its most influential partners, producing over 50 NES games, including favorites such as Marble Madness, Iron Sword, and one of my personal favorites, Battletoads.
However, as the NES era gave way to the 16-bit era, the Stampers thought that too many companies were making 8-bit games for 16-bit machines. After much discussion about the current state of games, and the direction of the company, it was decided that Rare would withdraw from active game developer status to pursue something creative and original, utilizing the SNES’s split-screen abilities.
Chris Stamper began work on a new 24-bit technology using a Silicon Graphics workstation, and then convert them to 2 dimensional images on the SNES. Rare’s major trump card was that other companies would still be making cartoon sprites, but Rare’s game would be using pre-rendered art. Using this technology, they began to design a boxing game, and invited Nintendo of Japan to their headquarters at Twycross, England.
“We had a visit from Mr. Takeda [Genyo Takeda - one of Nintendo’s top engineers]. We decided to show him a demonstration of a boxing game we had created, using rendered graphics on a Silicon Graphics workstation. He was very impressed and asked, “what would this look like on a Super NES?” So into the evening and the next day, we had two of our engineers work on taking the 24-bit true color imagery and convert it to the Super NES”
Chris Stamper
The design of the system that Chris Stamper had created was good, good enough that for the most part, the images looked exactly like the Silicon Graphics counterpart.
“When we took the guys from NCL [Nintendo Co., Ltd.] to the art department and showed them what we had, they kept looking under the table. I asked what they were doing. They said that they were looking for the big computer because they didn’t understand that everything was being done in a small box.”
Tim Stamper
Nintendo of Japan left England impressed, and when word reached then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi, he wanted to know what kind of game the Stampers wanted to create. They asked him if they could use the Donkey Kong license for the technology. After Nintendo’s blessing, they began working on the game.
When all was complete, the new game, Donkey Kong Country, was demonstrated at the CES of 1994. At once the editors knew what the big game was for 1994. Donkey Kong Country was an important milestone for Nintendo, because not only did it demonstrate the technical prowness of the SNES, but also Nintendo proved that they could make games look just as good on the SNES as the Genesis could on the 32X, an expansion for the Sega Genesis.
Rare would also go on to create some very memorable games that helped Nintendo’s success with later systems. GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong Racing, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Perfect Dark, and Banjo-Kazooie remain some of the Nintendo 64’s best selling games. Who knows what the future holds for Rare, but it looks brighter than ever, and if developing on other consoles means better games from Rare, then I may have to buy another console.
[Editors Note] I credit most, if not all the information and quotes used in this article, to “The Ultimate History of Video Games”, by Steven L. Kent. His book offers a blow-by-blow account on the whole history of games, and is definitely recommended reading.