Rare is a British video game developer located in Twycross, England. The company was established in 1985 by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, who previously founded Ultimate Play the Game. While Ultimate Play the Game focused on the creation of computer video games for systems such as ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, their new entity “Rare” would focus on the home console market.

Tim and Chris Stamper formed a relationship with Nintendo very early in the life of Rare securing an unlimited budget from Nintendo, primarily to concentrate on the development of Nintendo Entertainment System games. Over the course of Rare’s first several years developing for the Nintendo Entertainment System they created many successful games such as Wizards & Warriors, R.C. Pro-Am and Battletoads.

The success of Rare proved to be very beneficial to Nintendo and it did not go unnoticed. Nintendo continued to invest in Rare and in 1994 bought a 25% stake in Rare making them a partial owner of the company. Nintendo gradually increased their stake in Rare to 49% essentially making Rare a prominent second-party developer for Nintendo. During this period, Rare started selling their games under the trademark name “Rareware”.

The company was considered one of Nintendo’s key developers and had enough recognition that Nintendo offered Rare the Nintendo catalogue of characters to create a 3D CGI game. The Stamper brothers asked for Donkey Kong, resulting in the creation of Donkey Kong Country. Donkey Kong Country was developed by a total of 20 people over an 18-month development cycle. The game was a critical success, with critics praising the game’s highly advanced visuals and art style. Donkey Kong Country sold over eight million copies worldwide, making it the third best-selling game in the Super Nintendo library.

Rare became synonymous for high quality games pumping out hit after hit throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. Rare received international recognition and critical acclaim for games such as the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Killer Instinct, GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day.