Hey there,
Since I already posted here a couple of times, I figured why not type a proper introduction, but also looking at my own background I was wondering if there’s anyone else like me roaming these forums. Specifically, people who have been following Rare’s work since the olden days.
I’ve been playing Rare games since the first Donkey Kong Country. I followed the studio through the Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, GameCube, and then into Xbox and Xbox 360. I was even part the team behind a fairly popular Rare fansite years ago, and I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of the people who worked on games like Viva Piñata or Kameo... but our paths diverged around the time of Kinect Sports. I never owned an Xbox One, and after a pretty good number of years with the 360 I lost interest in Microsoft’s vision for their first party game line and I turned PlayStation into my main platform. Then one day, a friend mentioned Sea of Thieves. “You should really try this, you will enjoy it,” he said.
But I wouldn’t try it until much later. Until earlier this year, in fact. I got myself an Xbox Series X and I gave the game a go with GamePass. Despite never having been into multiplayer games, I loved it. It felt like classic Rare, immediately. It reminded me of their N64 days, when they would regularly jump into a complete new genre and suddenly make of the best games available for it with seemingly no effort. Here I was, having a blast with an online multiplayer when I never really cared for them, just like it happened all those years ago with stuff like Goldeneye, Blast Corps or Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
I also enjoyed finding the studio’s trademark British sense of humor still intact, and seeing all those subtle references to their legacy in the game’s world. But at the same time, it made me wonder “how many people playing this will know what some of this stuff is? Could many of the original Nintendo-era fans still be around after all these years, to pick up on these things?” For a while, I had a Joanna Dark figurehead on my ship hoping that someone, somewhere, might see it and go “hey, Perfect Dark!” I’m planning on making this even more obvious by buying one of the full legacy sets from the old games. I know if I ever bumped into one of those ships I’d definitely want to talk to the crew.
Anyways.
Is anyone around here a Rare veteran—perhaps even an Ultimate fan?