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I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. As I recall each artist had an SGI Indigo2 and later on th

I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. As I recall each artist had an SGI Indigo2 and later on the SGI O2 because the standard artist workstation. I believe our lead artist used an SGI Onyx. Programmers had Indy2's with the internal N64 development boards. 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.

rootsudo 5y ago
That's really cool. :) I wonder if you should share any stories of working at Rareware during that time period?
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  ohhh i fantasize about being 3d artist / producer in the 90s. i collect whatever I can find from this era. I will make use of my Net Yaroze and release a PS1 game one day!!!
ramesh31 5y ago
>I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. 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?
- valley_guy_12 5y ago
  As an outsider, I believe Rareware's secret sauce was a combination of a can-do, down-to-the-metal, fast-feedback-loop game development style that came from the pre-PC British bedroom game coders, a management team that understood how to manage game development and releases, and Nintendo's coaching on mascot development and general game polishing. 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.
  - AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
    > 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. 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/69d19b00eb25ffde0f1dcc79c7295371.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/d1/9b/69d19b00eb25ffde0f1d...
    - Jach 5y ago
      It also looked better on a CRT. I still remember getting the GameCube with Star Fox Adventures as my first game for my birthday a few weeks after it came out and just being mesmerized by the graphics. (But I also remember a similar mesmerization when I got an N64 with Super Mario 64, the same TV serviced NES, SNES, N64, GC, and Wii.)
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    To continue on the similarities, Epic and Rareware also had/have problems with worker burnout. Pretty much every N64 Rareware classic drove at least a few people out of the company. By the time Nintendo and Microsoft got into a bidding war over the company there wasn't much talent left in it[0]. Fortnite is the same way: the fast pace of content churn means people are working constant overtime, and the perpetual nature of the game means there's no release that you're crunching for. 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.
    - postalrat 5y ago
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  From Martin Hollis' wikipedia page(project head for Goldeneye 007): > 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.
- midnightclubbed 5y ago
  So the secret sauce was... interesting! Unlike any other company I have seen. 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.
  - willmw101 5y ago
    This was fascinating, thanks for sharing.
- rasz 5y ago
  The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast): Rare: The Inside Story - The Retro Hour EP180 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7rX3ZIBoE 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iuCg_rqVL8
samstave 5y ago
I went to Animation school and learned on Indigo's and O2s for Maya and Softimage... ~1994 -> 1996 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.
- mixtur2021 5y ago
  Do you mean Power Animator perhaps and not Maya? I believe Maya, Power Animator's successor, came later around ~1998.
  - samstave 5y ago
    Correct! I couldnt recall Alias|Wavefront name when I made that comment... (Alias became Maya) --- I was focused on Softimage, as I liked the UI better. (Should have picked Alias though)
- ______-_-______ 5y ago
  SGI was a key part of some of the most iconic early games (even Nintendo used them!) There isn't much of an emulation scene, probably because of how specialized they were, the weird architecture, and the diversity of workstations. And lots of the old machines were just tossed after they became obsolete. It's a huge shame from a preservation point of view.
Forgeties79 5y ago
A lot of what I read about Rare talks about insane hours/relatively high turnover in staff. Did you find that to be the case?
Melatonic 5y ago
Get us another Banjo Kazooie already!
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Very well. Nuts and Bolts 2 is now entering active development.
  - Melatonic 5y ago
    Wait a minute.....you are not the person I replied to! So can we expect a release next week?
- midnightclubbed 5y ago
  Ha! I'm long gone from Rare and was on a different team... lead designer of Banjo and a number of the engineers/artists are still there I believe so who knows. Dream can come true!
  - PostOnce 5y ago
    "Dream can come true!" is not a typo, dear readers. 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 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!
- Jach 5y ago
  Have you missed Yooka-Laylee?
lostgame 5y ago
I read somewhere, recently - from a developer at Rare; who stated that the government was actually concerned as to why this company would have, effectively - a huge cluster of supercomputers, and wanted to make sure they weren’t using them for military stuff, etc. 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.

rootsudo 5y ago

That's really cool. :) I wonder if you should share any stories of working at Rareware during that time period?

tomatowurst 5y ago
ohhh i fantasize about being 3d artist / producer in the 90s. i collect whatever I can find from this era. I will make use of my Net Yaroze and release a PS1 game one day!!!

ramesh31 5y ago

>I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. 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?

valley_guy_12 5y ago
As an outsider, I believe Rareware's secret sauce was a combination of a can-do, down-to-the-metal, fast-feedback-loop game development style that came from the pre-PC British bedroom game coders, a management team that understood how to manage game development and releases, and Nintendo's coaching on mascot development and general game polishing. 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.
- AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
  > 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. 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/69d19b00eb25ffde0f1dcc79c7295371.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/d1/9b/69d19b00eb25ffde0f1d...
  - Jach 5y ago
    It also looked better on a CRT. I still remember getting the GameCube with Star Fox Adventures as my first game for my birthday a few weeks after it came out and just being mesmerized by the graphics. (But I also remember a similar mesmerization when I got an N64 with Super Mario 64, the same TV serviced NES, SNES, N64, GC, and Wii.)
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  To continue on the similarities, Epic and Rareware also had/have problems with worker burnout. Pretty much every N64 Rareware classic drove at least a few people out of the company. By the time Nintendo and Microsoft got into a bidding war over the company there wasn't much talent left in it[0]. Fortnite is the same way: the fast pace of content churn means people are working constant overtime, and the perpetual nature of the game means there's no release that you're crunching for. 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.
  - postalrat 5y ago
oh_sigh 5y ago
From Martin Hollis' wikipedia page(project head for Goldeneye 007): > 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.
midnightclubbed 5y ago
So the secret sauce was... interesting! Unlike any other company I have seen. 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.
- willmw101 5y ago
  This was fascinating, thanks for sharing.
rasz 5y ago
The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast): Rare: The Inside Story - The Retro Hour EP180 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7rX3ZIBoE 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iuCg_rqVL8

samstave 5y ago

I went to Animation school and learned on Indigo's and O2s for Maya and Softimage... ~1994 -> 1996 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.

mixtur2021 5y ago
Do you mean Power Animator perhaps and not Maya? I believe Maya, Power Animator's successor, came later around ~1998.
- samstave 5y ago
  Correct! I couldnt recall Alias|Wavefront name when I made that comment... (Alias became Maya) --- I was focused on Softimage, as I liked the UI better. (Should have picked Alias though)
______-_-______ 5y ago
SGI was a key part of some of the most iconic early games (even Nintendo used them!) There isn't much of an emulation scene, probably because of how specialized they were, the weird architecture, and the diversity of workstations. And lots of the old machines were just tossed after they became obsolete. It's a huge shame from a preservation point of view.

Forgeties79 5y ago

A lot of what I read about Rare talks about insane hours/relatively high turnover in staff. Did you find that to be the case?

Melatonic 5y ago

Get us another Banjo Kazooie already!

smoldesu 5y ago
Very well. Nuts and Bolts 2 is now entering active development.
- Melatonic 5y ago
  Wait a minute.....you are not the person I replied to! So can we expect a release next week?
midnightclubbed 5y ago
Ha! I'm long gone from Rare and was on a different team... lead designer of Banjo and a number of the engineers/artists are still there I believe so who knows. Dream can come true!
- PostOnce 5y ago
  "Dream can come true!" is not a typo, dear readers. 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 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!
Jach 5y ago
Have you missed Yooka-Laylee?

lostgame 5y ago

I read somewhere, recently - from a developer at Rare; who stated that the government was actually concerned as to why this company would have, effectively - a huge cluster of supercomputers, and wanted to make sure they weren’t using them for military stuff, etc. 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.