Rare Strives for Excellence by Taking Risks

There have been the highs (Conker’s Bad Fur Day) and the lows (Perfect Dark Zero) for developer Rare. Going from what was essentially a second-party position to a Microsoft-owned developer, the company has gone through some dramatic changes, and yet with the announcement of a Viva Pinata sequel and a third game in the Banjo series, we find ourselves in familiar but somehow new territory.

1UP recently spoke with Rare’s Gregg Mayles about how Rare has always set itself apart from the rest of the game development world, where the inspiration for Banjo’s new game mechanic came from, and how things have changed between being Microsoft owned and developing for a single system rather than dragging games through several generations. (See: Perfect Dark and Kameo)

So for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, did the idea of making your own vehicles, which is a central game mechanic, evolve from coming up with new things to do with Banjo? Or was that a separate idea that made you think, “Hey, this works for Banjo“?

It came from a separate idea. It came from a very simple idea of wanting to combine pieces with different abilities. The beauty of the concept was [that] the player could combine those pieces in any order they wanted to, and at the end of it, whatever they created, you’d put into the game. It would just work. The player wouldn’t need to calculate very complicated processes; the software would do that. And no matter what you built, the size, the weight, the shape, you’d be able to put it in the game, and it would just work. But until Xbox 360, we’d never had a piece of hardware that’s been capable of doing that. So that’s where the idea in its infancy came from. It’s been around for a while, and at the same time, we were considering doing a new Banjo game but didn’t want to just do what we’d done previously.

The platform-game genre…has probably not had a lot of games in it recently. Obviously, Super Mario Galaxy has come out and it’s very nice, but it’s quite traditional in its approach, and apart from that, there probably aren’t too many major releases in that genre. So we thought, ‘If we’re going to reenter that genre, we need to do something that’s going to make people look twice at it,’ rather than just dismissing it as, ‘It’s Rare, there’s going to be millions of things to collect, and everything’ll have googly eyes.’ We had to do something different, so we wanted to take a different approach to platform games.

We looked at how traditional games have approached that — the designers create the abilities, we give them to the player, and the player can only use the abilities as we’ve defined. So we thought, “Can we approach that from a different direction, where the players actually get to define their own abilities so they can choose how they want to complete whatever task they’ve been set?” And then, suddenly, we had this concept sitting here, this idea of approaching platform games from a different direction, and then we brought the two together. The result is the new Banjo game.

For the full interview, head over to 1UP.

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