I've always been fascinated with Rareware. For such a tiny studio, the level of quality in the games they put out during that era is completely unparalleled, and many can justifiably still be held up as the greatest ever made.
What was the secret sauce? What was it like working there? How was the culture?
Each game team (of which there were 4 who I was there) was isolated from the other teams, only senior management and IT had access to the other team's floors/buildings. If someone from another team needed to visit for some reason we were usually instructed to turn off monitors. There was very little sharing of code and core graphics/gameplay features were fiercely protected by each team. The competition was not other games companies (with the exception of Nintendo) but the team in the next building.
There was almost no recruiting from other games studios, almost everyone was hired out of college (or recently so).
The management (Tim and Chris) generally let the teams do what they thought best and didn't push hard on things like deadlines. Release dates existed but were argued/negotiated with Nintendo when things slipped.
Employees were expected to be in the building at 9am (there was a bonus for punctuality, which I dint think I ever received and was reprimanded about several times). Lunch and dinner were provided, the studio was literally on a farm so there were no lunchtime distractions, and long hours were expected, although not mandated. 70+ hour weeks were not unusual.
Teams got a small bonus for shipping a game but then got a split of game sales (after some 'production cost' was subtracted). The split increased as Rareware negotiated higher payments from Nintendo, for later N64 games the team received something insane like $1 per cartridge, which on a 10-16 person team with millions of sales was crazy money. People were paying cash for houses and Porsches.
Unfortunately while the generous bonuses drove the work culture, it also caused a large amount of resentment. People on shelved projects, projects on low royalty rates (eg Goldeneye), or poor selling products put in the same or more work but did not anywhere near the same fiscal rewards. It was a side effect of Tim and Chris being extremely generous and wanting to do the right thing by the staff but it did cause a number of departures (albeit mostly from the Goldeneye team), I think this has been discussed publicly by many of those folks.
Rareware's talents were big advantages in the early 3D game console era. But by the PS2 / Xbox era, their special skills didn't help as much.
Today I'd say that Epic's Fortnite is the spiritual successor of the old Rareware.
I would disagree that this was good management, though. Burning out your talent is how and why game studios fall apart over time. Had they retained talent and kept crunch time low they probably would have continued churning out hits on the GameCube and Wii instead of stinkers on the Xbox. In fact, Nintendo probably understands this[1] - for example, when Retro Studios imploded they bought them out and immediately banned overtime work at the studio.
[0] Microsoft didn't understand this, and this is why they wound up overpaying for Rare.
[1] Or at least did in the Iwata era. No clue if Kimishima or Fukukawa have the same convictions, but given that Nintendo hired them both internally I imagine they do.
well, "effective" management. Not necessarily good. Seems like a story that pretty much all large gen 5 (and many gen 6) studios share. It was this new cutting edge field right before/after the dotcom bubble requiring (at the time) very niche talent and passion. Perfect formula for burn and churn.
This was likely one of the many thousand cuts the industry faced when moving to the HD era in gen 7. You couldn't just brute force a bunch of assets to work at the expected HD fidelity without stepping back and actually understanding what the machine is doing. You couldn't just have two artists doing everything for asset production; you needed an organized pipeline of specialists. You absolutely needed a producer/manager/director to make sure pieces are fitting together. Huge wakeup call for game developers on software/business practices most other parts of the industry had to employ for years.
StarFox Adventures on the Gamecube was probably their last "holy crap" game from a technical perspective. There wasn't anything else at the time, on any console, that did realistic-looking fur as good as that game:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/d1/9b/69d19b00eb25ffde0f1d...
> Hollis remarked that he worked non-stop on the game, "[averaging] an 80 hour week over the 2 and a half years of the project", and that the team he recruited was very talented and dedicated even though most of it was composed of people who had never worked on video games.
I guess the answer is insane levels of talent + dedication, and don't worry too much about domain expertise. Probably my favorite factoid out of there is that Goldeneye multiplayer was an afterthought, and basically one dude hacked it together in a couple of weeks at the end of the development cycle.
Rare: The Inside Story - The Retro Hour EP180 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7rX3ZIBoE
The History of Rare - The Retro Hour @ Retrospillmessen Norway 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iuCg_rqVL8
Years later when we were collapsing ILM into the new Presidio Campus, the amount of SGI full-rack sized machines being thrown into the trash was insane.
I believe they turned at least one into a keg-erator...
I could have had an opportunity to get one of the cabinets, but I didnt have a place to put it. Wish I had figured out a place to keep one.
The SGI cases were a thing of beauty.
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I was focused on Softimage, as I liked the UI better. (Should have picked Alias though)
The interviewer stated they’d laughed and said ‘no, we’re just making video games’. It gave me a giggle, and demonstrates just how advanced these systems were.
Here is a video, only released decades later, of the SNES game midnightclubbed refers to, which fell by the wayside as the N64 came about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w72kj20YNA0
I was surprised to find my jaw dropping at an SNES game after all this time.
Imagine, this and Super Mario World are the same platform!
So can we expect a release next week?
There were at least 2 rack mounted SGI machines used for large-scale rendering jobs (ie promotional images, magazine covers etc). May have been SGI Challenges (I know one certainly was) and were kept off-limits to most staff, at the time they were rumored to cost $250k each.