25 years of the N64: Rareware's incredible N64 run

Rareware's tremendous N64 output is a significant part of why the console remains held in such high regard 25 years later.

On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Rareware was a significant part of the reason that Nintendo held up even as well as they did against Sony’s entry into the console market. In total, including Japanese exclusives, the Nintendo 64 library clocked in at under 400 games. Rareware alone was responsible for 11 of them, and chances are good you are at the least familiar with 10 of those.

Five years of the Nintendo 64, and 11 games. Rareware wasn’t some major publisher with a bunch of studios under its belt, like an EA or an Ubisoft or what have you: they were a second-party developer of Nintendo’s that occasionally published their own titles. The N64, lacking the third-party support of its predecessor, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, needed more than just what Nintendo itself could give it. And Rareware stepped up to the plate again and again to not just fill in those gaps, but produce plenty of classics of their own, right alongside the ones Nintendo’s first-party studios created.

Now, not every Rareware game on the N64 was a critical darling and/or massive commercial success, but the vast majority of them were at least one of the two, with quite a few of those titles still held in high regard now, decades later. And all of this was developed while Rareware was busy with the Game Boy Color, too: another six games were developed for that system (and one for the Game Boy) while the N64 was active. Rareware was able to expand their studios considerably when Nintendo increased their stake in the company to 49 percent, from 84 employees to 250, and this is part of what allowed the developer to ramp up the number of projects they could handle at once.

Conker stands next to the Rareware logo after taking a chainsaw to the N64 logo

It helped, too, that Rare was open to the idea of just a handful of people putting together a game at once: that’s how something like Blast Corps, the second Rareware release on the N64 came to be, courtesy a team of just four-to-seven developers, depending on where in the cycle you’re referring to. These releases would sometimes push the boundaries of what the Nintendo 64 was capable of — Donkey Kong 64 required the Expansion Pak that doubled the system’s RAM, for instance, and only 33 percent of Perfect Dark was available to be played by people without the Expansion Pak add-on.

Things didn’t necessarily start out so hot for Rare on the N64: their first release was 1996’s Killer Instinct Gold. This was the sequel to the SNES hit, but it was neither the critical nor commercial success its predecessor was, and it, to some degree, ended up putting this franchise on ice until it was revived in the last decade by Microsoft. Killer Instinct Gold is easily forgotten about for reasons outside of its mediocrity: the next game released by Rare would kick off a ridiculous string of releases that, as said, were critical or commercial successes, and sometimes both.

Blast Corps

The first of these was Rare’s first release of 1997: Blast Corps. While it sold one million copies, it was considered a disappointment by the company themselves which just goes to show you how Rare games usually sold. Considering this was early in the Nintendo 64 lifespan, though, and that it was a brand new, hard-to-describe property, one million copies is tremendous, really. And the game was a critical darling, even if it’s comparatively underrated because of the success of other Rareware games that would follow.

Blast Corps was ranked number 89 on my Nintendo top 101. In short, it kicks ass. A slightly longer explanation has already been written:

The titular Blast Corps is a demolition crew with two primary goals: find and rescue all of the people in an area that is about to see demolition, and also, clear a pathway for the truck carrying broken nuclear weapons through this area. You discover where the people waiting to be rescued are the same way you clear a path for this weapon of mass destruction: by knocking over buildings with vehicles. These vehicles range from a bulldozer that is effective at slamming itself into smaller buildings until they topple and in pushing blocks of TNT into larger buildings, to a dune buggy that destroys buildings by hitting jumps that allow you to land on top of them, to a one-armed robot that tumbles into buildings and only has one arm because Rare’s developers ran out of space while making the game.

Blast Corps features some intense arcade action, with you trying to beat the clock again and again, in progressively tougher levels, using a variety of vehicles to do so. The game looks short on the surface, but is full of so many modes and additional difficulty modifiers that… well, I still haven’t actually completed the thing. Barely anyone has: it’s nigh impossible to do so, because the developers themselves made their obscene performances the benchmark for earning top ranks in the game’s missions.

This game might not be the first Rareware game on the N64 most people think about, and it doesn’t have the legacy that something like GoldenEye 007 does, but it’s one of the three best Rare titles on the system, anyway. Which is really saying something when you consider the other two I’m referencing here, but more on those later.

GoldenEye 007

It’s hard to overstate just how influential and vital GoldenEye 007 is to the first-person shooter genre. There were other first-person shooters on consoles before GoldenEye, and even on the N64 — Turok: Dinosaur Hunter released in February of 1997, while GoldenEye didn’t see store shelves until August of that same year. GoldenEye, though, while not the first of its kind, certainly left an impression.

Just don’t stare at Pierce Brosnan’s face too long or you won’t be able to unsee it. You know what I’m referring to.

The stages didn’t let you just run around blasting, as the missions were those of a secret agent: you had specific tasks to carry out, not all of them necessary involving blasting whoever or whatever was in your path, with some of them completed in a very secret agent-y way. High-tech gadgets were present, as you’d expect from a James Bond game. It was a real turning point for shooters, too, in that it showed that you could make FPS games without such a clear debt to DOOM in their gameplay, and on a console, too. And then there was, of course, the multiplayer. The four-player multiplayer. This is mostly what people remember, and the sheer amount of time they spent playing GoldenEye with friends is what leads people to say nostalgia-tinged things like “GoldenEye is better than Perfect Dark.” While those people are all very wrong, I at least understand the sentiment, because of the power that GoldenEye had over people back then, and the impact it made on both the industry and gamers in terms of what first-person shooters were capable of on consoles.

Diddy Kong Racing

Anyone familiar with Rareware’s platformers was not surprised at all when they discovered that the company was developing a racing game that managed to make itself about collecting various objects, too. Unlike with some of those platformers — yeah, we’re not going to really spend anymore time talking about Donkey Kong 64 here, as I’ve devoted all I want to devote of my life to it already, but I’ll at least make this not-very-veiled and derisive reference to its gameplay — it all works beautifully in Diddy Kong Racing.

The collection aspects work hand-in-hand with an increase in difficulty in Diddy Kong Racing, which lets you essentially go through the motions you would in, say, Mario Kart, without changing the difficulty yourself. Just like playing on 50cc gives you a game that is pretty difficult to lose, the first time you play a course in Diddy Kong Racing’s Adventure Mode is mostly there to teach you what the course actually is, to give you a chance to experience it in a relatively stress-free way. After completing each of the courses in an area this way — there are four different regions, which are basically “cups” to use kart racing parlance — you are then tasked with defeating a boss character in a race. In the first area, Dino Land, that boss is a dinosaur. A triceratops, to be more specific, and you have to race this dino one-on-one up a mountain. If you win, it unlocks the second level of difficulty, and additional collecting begins: you will now not only try to come in first place in the races to receive the balloon item that will help you unlock your next races, but you will also attempt to collect eight silver coins while you race. Doing so successfully means you’ve completed the intermediate difficulty, and can move on to the trophy race, where you race each track in a region in succession and receive point totals for your placement — that signals the completion of a region.

There were 10 characters in Diddy Kong Racing once you unlocked the secret ones, and some, like Conker and Banjo, were from as-of-yet unreleased games.

There are more bits to collect, three different vehicle types (kart, hovercraft for water, a plane for flying) and an additional difficulty to unlock once you’ve managed to complete everything else in the game, meaning there is quite a bit to Diddy Kong Racing. It’s the superior kart racer on the N64, and while Mario Kart 64 sold more games than everything besides Super Mario 64, Diddy Kong’s turn at the wheel ranked eighth on the system, with 4.9 million copies sold. It was also beloved by critics, who lauded the same systems I just did above. The blending of Rare’s knowledge of platform games and item collection with racing — another genre they were certainly familiar with — proved to be a perfect one, and it’s a shame we were never given the chance to play the GameCube sequel, Donkey Kong Racing, because Rare ended up purchased by Microsoft.

Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie

While 1997 featured three fantastic Rareware games on the N64, 1998 was limited to just the one: Banjo-Kazooie. Now, this game has not held up as well as some other Rare titles from the time, and neither has its sequel, Banjo-Tooie: both were eligible for the Nintendo top 101, for instance, but neither made it there. Which should not be a real surprise, considering the game that inspired them, Super Mario 64, was on the back-end of the list itself.

That all being said, these two games were great fun at the time of their releases, and are still fun to go back to now, albeit with a little more noticeable tedium in 2021 than they had decades ago. The genre they helped to grow, 3D platformers, has continued to grow since, and in ways that, at its best, eliminates the level of collection present in these games, as well as removing some of the kind of issues with movement and cameras that was inherent to these early days of this subgenre of platformer. There is a reason Super Mario 64 was the lowest-ranked 3D Mario game on the Nintendo top 101, you know, and Rare’s efforts within the same space are not immune to the same kinds of present-day criticisms.

Jet Force Gemini

We all have the same complaint about Jet Force Gemini. It’s actually kind of astounding how uniform the reception to this game was, from both fans and critics alike. Excellent concept, a wonderful use of arcade run-and-gun action and shoot-em-up enemy formations in a three-dimensional space. One question, though: why the fuck do you have to save every goddamn villager in the game in order to get to the end of it all?

The game’s three protagonists. Image credit: Nintendo Life

I still have not, to this day, completed Jet Force Gemini. I’ll get there eventually, now that the version of this game on the Xbox One’s Rare Replay Collection has a modern controls option that makes the game’s extremely N64-centric control scheme make sense on a more modern dual-stick pad. I am unlikely to forget how upset I was upon finding out that the villagers, who you were mostly encouraged but not told explicitly were necessary to save, needed to all be accounted for in order for you to proceed to the end game. I remember where I was, who I was with, and even what the big boss preceding this moment was like, despite only doing this once, and literally decades ago. The game left an impression on me, let’s say, and it’s a shame that the final impression was of a bad taste in my mouth, because really, this game is still a ton of fun.

I went back to it a bit before writing this up, just to check, and I can already remember how I got so sucked into it in the first place. Three different characters (four, if you want to play some co-op), who all play similarly enough that there’s no trouble but all have different abilities that mean they can access different parts of the same stages or tackle certain scenarios in a better way. The focus is on the action, so even though there is a story and dialogue, you’re never held up from just getting on with it like so often happens in something like Banjo-Kazooie. It’s really just the one fatal flaw with the villagers here, but I guess it wouldn’t be a Rare game if they didn’t go one step too far with collection, huh? Regardless, I still like this game, and I really do want to go back and exorcise this particular demon. Just, uh, don’t be surprised when I start swearing because an ant with a laser rifle blew up an explosive barrel near some villagers, forcing me to try a stage again.

Perfect Dark

By and large, first-person shooters just get better and better, and often leave the genre’s past in the dust as new innovations and better technical aspects mean more refined games that can expand on the genre’s origins in ways that were unthinkable just a few years prior. This doesn’t mean older FPS are bad now or anything like that: it’s just that the genre has evolved specifically in a way that can sometimes make older FPS feel very much their age, or a little too simple or even frustrating to return to.

Like with anything else, however, there are classics of the genre that will hold up regardless of the time period they released in, though. DOOM is an obvious case — it’s not just ported to literally every possible platform for kicks, but also because who doesn’t want to be able to play DOOM whenever and wherever they are? — but then there is also Perfect Dark. It released late in the Nintendo 64’s lifecycle, in May of 2020, and since it required the Expansion Pak, not everyone who bought it necessarily experienced the game in full. Those who did have the Expansion Pak, though, and were also one of the 2.5 million people who bought the game, know exactly why I’m going to publish a massive Perfect Dark feature before this month is out. It was everything great about GoldenEye, only refined, only bigger, only better, and that goes for single-player, co-op, and competitive modes.

If you feel a little cheated that it’s not getting more of a write-up in this space, don’t you worry: it’s the best game Rareware released on the N64, one of the very best games on the entire system, and likely the best game Rare has ever made, just in general. It deserves more than a capsule in a Rare-focused feature, and it’ll get it.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Conker’s Bad Fur Day was not a commercial success for the Nintendo 64. Not even close. It wasn’t one of the system’s million sellers, of which there were around 50, and this was in large part due to its release date: Conker’s Bad Fur Day was actually shown around at gaming conventions back before even Banjo-Kazooie released, but it wouldn’t reach its final, send-up-of-the-genre, Looney-Tunes-with-more-masturbation-jokes form until 2001. It has become something of a cult classic, though, in part because it’s packed with adult humor and the British spelling or pronunciation of various swears — “Fuck off crows” wasn’t making it into a game on a Nintendo system, but “Feck off crows” sure did — and in part because it’s just a damn good game.

Conker, asking the same questions as the rest of us. Image credit: Rintendo

Sure, some of the humor has not aged well — I get it, characters who are not the comparatively mild-mannered and calm Conker, you think some people are both fat and bitches — but there’s still plenty here that works well simply for its absurdity. Conker essentially has to solve some platforming challenges in order to help a bee who has been thrown out by the Queen for his attraction to a sunflower, uh, pollinate her. He fights a giant monster made of poo who also happens to have an affinity for the opera. The entire game’s premise is based on two things: an evil king’s desire for his table to no longer wobble so he won’t spill his milk, and Conker having a few too many at the pub the night before, leading him into starting the titular Bad Fur Day, where he just wants to get back home for a nap, a bit hungover.

The multiplayer alone is a treat, as it created a third-person shooter with a variety of fun weapons to use, all while you play some cute platforming characters who, just from appearance, you wouldn’t think exist inside of the same vulgar game as the horny bee and the poo monster. Conker’s Bad For Day isn’t for everyone — it also should not be for everyone — but it was still a fine cap on Rareware’s N64 output, and a superior way to remember their time with Nintendo than Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube is.

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Why, given all of this success on the Nintendo 64, did Nintendo end up selling Rareware to Microsoft after just a single GameCube release? For one, Nintendo didn’t own the majority of Rare, they just owned everything Rare did not: Rareware itself, with its slate of non-Nintendo intellectual property from myriad games they themselves published, went looking for other buyers when Nintendo did not bother to approach Rare about acquiring the rest of the studio themselves. Microsoft wanted to snatch up studios even in the early days of the Xbox platform, especially after seeing an established entity like Sega bow out of the console game, and Rare was a fit.

Nintendo didn’t just let Rare walk away, either: they were in a three-way fight for ownership of the company, against not just Microsoft, but Activision as well. It should be pointed out that the Rare that still existed at this point was not necessarily the one that had thrived on the SNES and N64: many employees of Rare had left to form their own studios, like Free Radical Design, which would go on to make the Timesplitters series, and key figures like Martin Hollis of GoldenEye fame went to work for Nintendo directly. Even more employees left when the company was sold to Microsoft, and while Rare continued to develop some high-quality games into the era of the Xbox 360 — Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, to me, is the high-point of that franchise, and the Viva Pinata games are inspired efforts — they eventually settled in to be something much different than what they used to be. Developing games for Microsoft’s motion-sensor add-on, Kinect and working on Xbox Live’s avatar system felt like a disappointing use of the studio, considering its rich history, but as said: what was left at this point wasn’t necessarily even the same studio that once was.

Now, Sea of Thieves has been a priority in the present, and while it didn’t receive the kinds of reviews Rare games of the past did, it has managed to be a massive success, anyway. The spirit of Rare still lives on elsewhere, of course. Free Radical Design has been revived by publisher Deep Silver, and a new TimeSplitters might actually be on the way. Former Rare employees of the Microsoft era left the company and formed Playtonic, which has released a pair of Yooka-Laylee games — the hyphen gives away what that’s supposed to be a spiritual successor to. Former Rare employees and studios founded by them are still all over the industry, and the influence they had on the rest of said industry is undeniable. The old Rare might not exist anymore, not the one written about in this space today, but it doesn’t necessarily have to. They accomplished their mission, buoying the Nintendo 64 and helping to bring transformative change to multiple genres at a time of extreme upheaval and innovation in video games. It’s hard to achieve that kind of run in the first place, never mind topping it.

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