Dear Reader:
RARE talks A LOT about Nintendo (Nintendo's direction, Miis, the old days, and more)
Really, there is way too much to mention in a summary. You have to click over and read the full interview. It’s an interview with RARE…you know there will be a lot of Nintendo talk!
A portion of a 1up interview with RARE’s Mark Betteridge
1UP: Do you miss working with Nintendo?
MB: Yeah. Well, not miss, exactly — we still have a great relationship with Nintendo. There’s a lot of mutual respect there; we still speak with them now and again. They’re a great business, and we share a lot of the same philosophies. They are about gameplay rather than “all we think we can do is make money.” All we wanted to do at Rare was to make great games that people love playing. The success came because of that — it was never our aim. Nintendo came from a similar era, and they were like-minded people. We find people like that all around — people like Ken Lobb [Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye] that we worked with during the Nintendo days. He’s been involved with Banjo — he’s been involved with everything we do — and he’s a great person.
Times change, and Nintendo as a company has changed, even when we were with them. We were with Mr. [Minoru] Arakawa and Howard Lincoln primarily, but we knew [Satoru] Iwata quite well, and [Shigeru] Miyamoto-san, obviously. They used to come and visit, and they were great people. The unusual thing, I suppose, at Nintendo is that the execs [that are in place] now were originally developers, which is quite unique. So it’s not so much that I miss the original people; I just miss the people and the personal contact. There were some happy times there.
1UP: So you were planning the Avatar system before Nintendo’s Miis?
MB: We work on a lot of things that aren’t released until the time is right. We couldn’t implement them at the Xbox 360’s launch because there were just too many things on the plate for us to start going “Let’s build these characters and put them in the dash!”