We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

A lot of Internet people these days (particularly with the present incredibly silly wave of 90s nostalgia that seems to be spearheaded by twentysomethings that don’t know nothin about nothin) really lionize that Nintendo–Rare partnership, don’t they? Personally I don’t think it was really all that. It was just good business sense while it lasted.

Rare had a proven ability to make games to order—note how a lot of their pre-DKC stuff was borderline shovelware stuff (that’s not to say they didn’t have creativity or shiny new SGI workstations by 1994, only that there was a method to the madness). They could make the kinds of stuff for the N64 that Nintendo wouldn’t dare/bother to make themselves, for a while. Eventually, the N64 lost market share, Rareware was basically repeating itself with certain releases, and it probably behooved Nintendo at the time to try doing something different—and perhaps they didn’t need whatever it was they were getting from Rare.

Perhaps they did, considering how the GameCube fared, but hey, Microsoft didn’t seem to get everything they wanted out of that deal, either—I suppose they might have been hoping Kameo would be a killer app in certain markets; they had a good eye making sure Halo would be an exclusive, after all (Well, the GameCube has more lasting titles on it than the Xbox, all things considered; sometimes bad business is good games too...).

Both Nintendo and Rare being fairly secretive companies, it’s hard to say what the real dirt is, though.