Rare

UK · Founded 1982 · Developer

Rare (originally Ultimate Play the Game) created Knight Lore's isometric 3D before becoming Nintendo's most important second-party developer, producing Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007, and Banjo-Kazooie.

Tim and Chris Stamper founded Ultimate Play the Game in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire in 1982, initially producing ZX Spectrum games. Knight Lore (1984) pioneered isometric 3D graphics, demonstrating visual and technical sophistication far beyond what the Spectrum hardware was believed capable of. The brothers renamed the company Rare in 1985 and secured a deal with Nintendo in 1994 that gave them Silicon Graphics workstations to develop Donkey Kong Country. The result was a SNES game that appeared to display pre-rendered 3D graphics — an illusion created by rendering sprites on SGI machines then converting them to SNES sprite data. The game sold 9 million copies, revitalised the Donkey Kong franchise, and established Rare as Nintendo's pre-eminent second-party developer. GoldenEye 007 (1997) on N64, developed by a team of mostly first-time game designers, became one of the best-selling N64 games and established the template for console first-person shooters. Microsoft acquired Rare from Nintendo in 2002 for $375 million.