RAR had solid archiving, ZIP didn't. That was HUGE for the emulation scene before 7zip, consider an SNES game: 1. JP version 2. NA version 3. PAL version A

RAR had solid archiving, ZIP didn't. That was HUGE for the emulation scene before 7zip, consider an SNES game: 1. JP version 2. NA version 3. PAL version And possibly 1 or more revisions of each of the above. With RAR the size was often not much more than if a single version was compressed. Not so with ZIP