Retro Studios: Nintendo’s champion in the west and the new Rare

I promise, I’ll get back to making non-Nintendo entries after this one, it’s just that I really feel the urge to get this one out there as soon as I can.

Throughout most of its history as a video game company, Nintendo has always had some sort of connection to a western developer creating games under the Nintendo banner. At first this “champion in the west” was British based developer Rareware who most of us have come to know from the games they developed for Nintendo during the 90s. However, Rare’s time has passed and a new champion, this time from Texas, has taken their place… Retro Studios.

Before talking about Retro, let’s have a small look back at Rare…

Rareware

The 90s was the golden age for Rare and the games they created for the SNES and N64 took them to the height of their fame. Their partnership with Nintendo offered them many opportunities, and for a while it was good. As gamers, we got a lot out of it… Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye and Banjo-Kazooie to name their big three. Unfortunately, the partnership that produced all those wonderful games ended after 7 years as a number of key employees left Rare, essentially gutting the company.

In 2002, the company that once stuck so close to Nintendo became a first party developer of Microsoft after the founders of Rare and Nintendo sold their stock to Microsoft for US$375 million total. Quite a deal for everyone concerned. Nintendo was able to lose a bit of dead weight and Microsoft gained what it thought to be a powerful ally in its push into the console gaming industry. It seemed like a good move at the time and would allow Rare to expand into areas that it wouldn’t have been able to with Nintendo… I’m sure that was the plan anyway…

However, as much as we all like to remember Rare for all they accomplished back in the 90s, it seems the company that had so much life in those days has become more of an undead zombie as of late. The name and logo are there but in a new form and the Intellectual Properties it has created over the years are floating around… somewhere… but there really isn’t much going on with Rare any more. Microsoft has mostly delegated them to utility creation with the Xbox Live Avatars and Kinect development. Aside from their effort to bring back Banjo-Kazooie in 2008, they really aren’t bothering to do anything with their established franchises or created new ones… but how can they? The development studios under Rare have been continually downsized by Microsoft, making them unable to create the larger games as they did in the past.

Everyone who made Rare something special are now gone and the company is a shadow of its former self… it is truly a sad place to be in for what was once considered to be a great console developer. However, back at Nintendo, there are many gamers who see a new development studio as being “the new Rareware”…

Retro Studios

Retro Studios was founded in 1998 by former Iguana Entertainment (the folks who created the Turok series) founder Jeff Spangenberg and allied itself with Nintendo, promising a number of mature games for Nintendo’s next generation system which became the GameCube. At the time Retro had four games in the works, including an American football simulator called NFL Retro Football, a vehicular combat game called Car Combat, an unnamed action-adventure game, and an RPG called Raven Blade. The studio was in shambles and none of these games where getting anywhere, it looked as if the studio was digging its own grave not long after it had been born…

It actually amazes me that Nintendo decided to grant Retro Studios a chance to develop a Metroid game, though from what I hear, it mostly had to do with a prototype first-person shooter engine that was shown to Shigeru Miyamoto in early 2000. Whatever it was, it set Retro into a new direction which, at first, was a rough road. After a short Metroid Prime teaser was shown during Space World 2000, all of the games they had been working on previously had been cancelled to make way for the development of Metroid Prime during 2001. Later, in early 2002, bought out Retro Studios for US$1 million, essentially creating a replacement for the void about to be left by Rareware.

When talk began about a new and unknown studio working on Metroid Prime, a lot of people were very worried and didn’t know what to expect. It had been a number of years since the release of Super Metroid in 1994 and this game was being handled by a Western developer as what appeared to be a first-person shooter! Lucky for us, it turned out to be one of the greatest games released on the GameCube and indeed for that generation. Later Retro goes on to creating two more games in the Prime series as well as The Metroid Prime Trilogy… the respect they gained for the quality of these games is well earned.

The future of Retro Studios

However, the fact is that Retro has only really made three games and a compilation all using different versions of the same engine over a period of eight years. It’s going to take a lot more than what they’ve done so far for them to really come close to what Rareware achieved with Nintendo. That said, Retro Studios has proved with Donkey Kong Country Returns that they had what it took be an effective replacement to Rare… the real question now is if they can surpass Rareware.

We know Retro is fully capable of creating quality games from well-known Nintendo franchises as they did with Metroid and Donkey Kong… but we still don’t know whether they’d be able to stand as strong with an original IP under their belt. At this stage, it looks as if Nintendo wants to avoid making the same mistake they did with Rare by giving them too much leeway in creating their own IPs only to have them slip out of their hands if Retro ever leaves Nintendo for whatever reason.

Hopefully we’ll get to see what new game will be coming from Retro Studios during E3 2011 or 2012… will it be a new Star Fox or new F-Zero? Will it be a Kid Icarus now that he’s back on the scene? Or will Retro finally be given the chance to create its own games. At this point in time, I have no idea what I’d like to see from Retro Studios… I have gotten a hell of a lot of enjoyment out of their games so far, so I have faith in what they can achieve… yet I’m always holding my breath with each new game.

So far Retro Studios has been with Nintendo longer than Rareware had, however Rare has a lot more to show for it than Retro. That said, Rare used to be a much larger developer than Retro ever was and is now… but perhaps slow and steady is the way to go for Nintendo’s new champion in the west.