The Kat Take: Two Parts of Rare’s Nintendo Legacy Ended This Week

Two major parts of Rare’s legacy were in the news this week as Xbox was once again racked by major layoffs.

First is the departure of Gregg Mayles, who spent more than 35 years with the company, after the cancellation of his project, Everwild. Elsewhere, Xbox canceled its Perfect Dark reboot after roughly five years of development, ending hopes of a comeback for the N64 icon. All told, it was a brutal day for games, and Xbox is far from finished. Rare, thankfully, is still standing, but its future is uncertain as it tries to chart a path forward.

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The Kat Take: End of two eras

I’ll start by stating my own feelings on yesterday’s events: Xbox has a lot to answer for after yesterday. The total failure of its strategy this generation has done incalculable damage to the games industry and the people who work in it. It has badly mismanaged its vast number of acquisitions, its release pipeline, and its service strategy, pivoting so many times that it might as well be an endless pirouette. As a fan of games, it’s been infuriating to watch.

Since this is a Nintendo blog, though, I’ll focus on Rare — one of the original Xbox acquisitions. Microsoft picked up Rare in 2003, back when it was still on the rise, dealing what some considered at the time to be a mortal blow to Nintendo (thankfully, it wasn’t). Rare was coming off a remarkable stretch in which it had released Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark, solidifying its standing as Nintendo’s most prestigious partner — a technical powerhouse that meshed well with its stakeholder’s more whimsical approach to games.

Rare declined under Microsoft, leading to arguments over whether it owed its outsized success to Nintendo, but I think that does a disservice to what it accomplished in its first 20 years. Rare was arguably the first western studio to support the NES, forging a profitable relationship with Nintendo through hits like Wizards & Warriors and Battletoads. The following generation, it gave Nintendo one of its biggest hits in Donkey Kong Country, revitalizing the character and paving the way for the next 30 years of the franchise — all of this before Rare turned the Bond license into a generational first-person shooter.

Gregg Mayles was a big part of that success. Starting with Rare in 1989 as a teenager, he went on to work on many of its biggest projects, among other things contributing to the creation of King K. Rool (“Maybe I should have spent more than 5 minutes coming up with his slightly rubbish name,” Mayles joked when Rool was confirmed for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate). Much as he is associated with classic gaming, though, Mayles was resistant to rehashing his previous work, earning the ire of Banjo fans hoping for a reboot of the beloved bear.

Instead, Mayles threw himself into Everwild, which began development in 2014 and was announced in 2019. While it was billed as a third-person action-adventure game, not much else was known about Everwild, though one report suggested that it would have been more Viva Piñata than God of War or The Last of Us. After it failed to appear at E3, VGC reported that it had been totally rebooted, and that it was optimistically planning to release in 2024.

That release never came. Everwild was canceled amid Xbox’s bloodletting of its portfolio, with Mayles departing in its wake. Just as he deserves credit for Rare’s successes, he also owns a large share of its failure. The project spun its wheels for several years before finally being canceled. Rare is likely to be significantly impacted by layoffs as a result

It’s hard to know what the consequences of Mayles’ exit will be, only that he will bring with him a huge amount of institutional history and knowledge bridging Rare’s Nintendo and Xbox era. Its the kind of knowledge and history that can’t be easily replaced.

The end of Perfect Dark

The other big piece of news coming out Wednesday’s layoffs was Xbox’s decision to shutter The Initiative and end development on its reboot of Perfect Dark. Rare wasn’t parts of its development, but Perfect Dark remains a significant part of its history, and the project’s cancellation has sent shockwaves that reverberate all the way back to the Nintendo 64.

Perfect Dark, if you’ll recall, was an attempt to recreate the success of Goldeneye under a franchise owned by Rare. It had a similar mix of first-person action and gadgets, and was critically acclaimed in its days for pushing the capabilities of the Nintendo 64. Its follow-up on the Xbox 360 was much less successful, but Perfect Dark is nevertheless fondly remembered by fans.

Its attempted reboot is a case study in big-budget game development gone wrong. My colleague Rebekah Valentine reported in 2023 that Perfect Dark had made little progress since its original reveal, suffering from a lack of vision and “roadblock after roadblock” even as it was internally touted as a potential franchise on par with Game of Thrones. It finally seemed to get back on track after Crystal Dynamics came aboard to assist with development, with a gameplay trailer appearing in 2024, but it seems it was too little too late.

It’s doubtful that Xbox will try again; instead, it will go into the vault with the rest of its growing franchise hoard. The worst case scenario is that Xbox becomes like EA — uncaring and disrespectful to the history under its care, only trotting them out to market some new free-to-play mobile game. Maybe the first warning was that Xbox opted to sideline Perfect Dark’s original developer so that it could indulge in a “quadruple-A” vanity project.

I’ll say this for Xbox — the 2010 remaster of Perfect Dark was pretty good, and the original gameplay holds up just fine. Play it while you can.

A Rare kind of studio

After everything, Rare is still standing — one of the very few studios that has been around since the 1980s. As it has passed from Nintendo to Xbox, it has managed to reinvent itself multiple times, with Sea of Thieves being the most recent example. With Everwild’s cancellation and Mayles’ departure, it will have to reinvent itself again.

I happen to be in the UK myself right now, which is perhaps one reason that I find myself feeling so reflective about Rare’s history. I’m currently staying in Guildford, which was a bustling hub for game development itself once, home to Lionhead and many other studios. They’re all gone now, for the most part — only Criterion Games and a branch of Larian remain.

So much of the games industry is transitory; prone to booms and busts and chasing whatever the hot trend happens to be. It makes it all the more notable when a studio like Rare manages to stick around, like an old tree that has managed to endure multiple forest fires. It’s the kind of history worth remembering — and respecting.

More Nintendo Reading: Donkey Kong Bananza’s developer revealed, new previews, and more

• More Donkey Kong Bananza impressions went live this week, with The Verge saying that it “unearths the franchise’s roots and rips them out.” 

• Surprising no one, Donkey Kong Bananza’s developer has been revealed to be Nintendo EPD — the team behind Super Mario Odyssey. It bodes well for Bananza’s odds when it released July 17.

• Meanwhile, Nintendo Cube has been unmasked as the developer of the Switch 2 Welcome Tour. It’s best-known as the developer of Mario Party Jamboree.

• The price of the original Nintendo Switch is apt to rise soon in Canada, Nintendo warned in an official statement.

• The full Q&A from the 85th Annual General Meeting of Shareholders is now live, with president Shuntaro Furukawa answering questions about the Switch 2’s price, supply, and more.

• The Verge confirmed the Switch 2 dock supports VRR, but it’s unclear why the Switch 2 itself does not.

• Lastly, I apologize for the formatting errors in last week’s newsletter and will do my best to ensure that I put out a better product going forward.

Submit to the Mailbag!

One of the perks of being a premium subscriber is that you get to submit questions to the weekly mailbag via the comment section in each issue. This week’s comment is from Adam M, who talks about their experience at the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto.

Thanks for the question, Adam! Nostalgia is big business in the video games industry — certainly, it was big traffic at IGN. During the pandemic, the price of many classic games spiked as nostalgia millennials bought the systems of their youth. I may or may not have splurged on a Sega Saturn just last year.

Will this trend continue? Certainly, every generation has its own nostalgia, and there will come a point when millennials go away (not yet, though). When that happens, we’ll have all the kids who are nostalgia for Fortnite, Minecraft, and everything else. Heck, Fortnite nostalgia is already a thing based on some of the most recent events. As for whether there will still be hardware nostalgia, well, there will always be hobbyists and collectors right? I figure at some point the Super Nintendo will be like owning a classic car — it’ll never go out of style.

As an aside, I’m extremely jealous you got to go to the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto. I hope I get to go myself some day!

Thanks for reading another issue of Nintenkats! We’ll be back with more Nintendo news, opinions, and mailbag questions next week!