Banjo-Kazooie and Sea of Thieves director Gregg Mayles, Rare’s most experienced and influential game designer, will leave the company after more than 35 years following the cancellation of Everwild
Banjo-Kazooie and Sea of Thieves director Gregg Mayles, Rare’s most experienced and influential game designer, will leave the company after more than 35 years following the cancellation of Everwild
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A sign the creative core is gone. Rare isn’t Rare anymore.
I hope they go on to star their own game studio!
He was the last one at Rare wasn’t he?
That means there’s none of the originals left, Rare in name only.
Oh!
Xbox is DONE, done…
I wouldn’t be surprised if Rare is just a Sea of Thieves maintenance studio now. Would be a real depressing job working at Rare if so, knowing Microsoft will milk that until it’s dry and then kill the studio.
Come to Nintendo 😉
Not to be an asshole, but two of those games take up, what, 20 years of the development/design experience he has?
I know great games take time, but that’s…that’s a long ass time.
Microsoft, the king of bleeding talent and only being left with IPs that they cant seem to pull out of development hell.
Louise O’Connor is apparently leaving too.
Could you imagine being in the same business, same company for that long, and basically be told “yeah we’re gonna lock your creative freedoms away” and then you just show up every day for server maintenance for a game that came out years ago?
With how much they’ve screwed Rare over with their recent decisions, I don’t really blame him at all. Hopefully Playtonic would be willing to help the dude out after this.
Wil Overton’s gotten fired also…ouch!
Keep in mind it’s not just Rare that’s been affected, a lot of game companies have.
I read this like Greg and Banjo were both leaving and I wondered if I didn’t understand something important about Banjo-Kazooie
There goes my hopes of Viva Piñata 3 😭
all that time keeping Sea of Thieves in maintenance mode just to cancel Everwild?
I wish I could throw away as much money as game dev studios do.
I don’t blame him, the old Rare is dead.
We get attached to company names because it’s easier to track and it’s a brand but we should really be only looking at who was there at the time great games were being made, if only a couple of the original team remain then it’s not the same studio and hasn’t been for years.
A better perspective is to just appreciate that we were treated to some fantastic games over the years and that’s enough, no need to pine for a sequel or a new game from the brand. The group of devs at Rare shone in the SNES and N64 era and then as people moved on, so did the quality.
Can anyone share any insight into what the problem is? Too comfortable and not motivated to make games? Not making enough money? Too much managerial politics? What happened?
I feel like people under-recognize how key Nintendo was in the success of their second party games on N64… I don’t know too many details but I do know there was design feedback and collaboration on some level albeit not full blown teams and tbh I really think it’s the only explanation for why the games had the polish they did, which was clearly lacking in most of the subsequent games (some of which were still great regardless eg Viva Pinata).
The man is pretty much at retirement age anyways….
Damn