Rare (company)
British video game developer
Rare Limited is a British video game developer and a studio of Activision based in Twycross. Rare's games span the platform, first-person shooter, action-adventure, fighting, and racing genres. Its most popular games include the Battletoads, Donkey Kong, and Banjo-Kazooie series, as well as games like GoldenEye 007 (1997), Perfect Dark (2000), Conker's Bad Fur Day (2001), Viva Piñata (2006), and Sea of Thieves (2018).
Tim and Chris Stamper, who also founded Ultimate Play the Game, established Rare in 1985. During its early years, Rare was backed by a generous budget from Nintendo, primarily concentrated on Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) games. During this time, Rare created successful games such as Wizards & Warriors (1987), R.C. Pro-Am (1988), and Battletoads (1991). Rare became a prominent second-party developer for Nintendo, which came to own a large minority stake in the company, with the release of Donkey Kong Country (1994). Throughout the 1990s, Rare started selling their games under the trademark name "Rareware" and received international recognition and critical acclaim for games such as the Donkey Kong Country trilogy (1994-1996), Killer Instinct (1994), GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie (1998), Perfect Dark (2000), and Conker's Bad Fur Day (2001).
In 2002, Microsoft bought Rare, which retained its original brand, logo, and most intellectual properties. Rare has since focused on developing games exclusively for the Xbox series of consoles, including Grabbed by the Ghoulies (2003), Kameo (2005), Perfect Dark Zero (2005), and Viva Piñata (2006).
“Rare (company)” enters the record as british video game developer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rare, company and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q642707. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rare (company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.