What Makes Rare Rare, Or Who Else Really Loves Atic Atac

[Monkey Boy 64]

Greetings, RWP. How ya been? Vidya gaems sure have been good lately! Pretty much haven't had any meaningful discussion with you guys since like... the middle of the last gaming generation. I See a lot of folks got name changes... Can I have one of those? Feel a little weird with this name as something resembling an adult. But I digress.

Over the holiday I came into a surprise Xbox One, and just shortly before that I'd been playing Yooka-Laylee on Switch- finally getting round to the derned thing after funding it! Good stuff. I got the Xbox One on top of that, and let me tell you, the first thing I did was Replay some Rare. Via Rare Replay. Oh boy, what a day. A good day. But also a bad day. A bad FUR day if ya catch my drift. But I digress again. Point is I been playing a lot of Rare and Rare-esque stuff lately, and it has reawakened something profound inside me, and brought me back to mine very first internet fandom community.

Amidst Banjo, Pinata, Kameo, Pinada, Conker, etc- games that I might not have played extensively, but at least had a decent amount of familiarity with just from years of actively perusing the community, there's also all this real old stuff. I'd basically divide Rare's history into two categories- pre Donkey Kong Country and post Donkey Kong Country. To me, Rare was always the big yellow R that showed up in front of Donkey Kong games. Banjo was initially just another game by the Donkey Kong guys, it wasn't until after playing BK I learned Rare was a state of mind, not just one more group of guys doing stuff for Nintendo. And I'm pretty sure by the time I learned it they were at MS anyway. REGARDLESS, I myself, and I imagine many of us are strictly post Donkey Kong Country Rare fans. I never played Snake, Rattle and Roll or Digger T Rock! Or Anticipation. Or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These were just weird titles I saw on Rare's online game list thing. I played enough Jet Pac to beat DK64, and I knew Sabreman was some old doofus who somehow wandered into Banjo-Tooie, and Battletoads was the stuff of meme legend, but had I played these damned things? No, of course not. I have a life! Well, no, I don't, but ya know what else I don't have? A ZX Spectrum! I learned like yesterday what the hell that thing even was!

So where the hell am I going with this? **** if I know! In any case, even though I wanted to try out these games as a curiosity, I kind of expected them to be just that- a curiosity. I'm gonna let out a hard truth- as gaming advances, most old games are kinda shit. Old and revered classics are often such because of how mind blowing they were for people when they first played them. Very few actually live up to any kind of nostalgic hype. So I figured the old Spectrum stuff, the old NES stuff, would probably be good for a couple laughs, but I didn't expect to really get much of a fulfilling experience out of them.

Jesus, was I wrong. I played Sabreman, and something about this game, something about it was just magic. Like these big old colorful pixel plants lining the walls of this black jungle- the animals and tribesfolk after me- this was more than doofy old arcade nonsene. This was a world I got myself pretty figgin' immersed in. And it felt great. Sabreman was not just the Doofus from Banjo-Tooie, he was a goddamn hero. Let me tell you, this guy beat Donkey Kong Country 2 100% because he had his all his hero coins. He fought his way through the jungle and survived the Sabre Wulfe! And it was awesome. I played the game once, got dead, thought, hmm, let's try again. And I just kept trying and trying to make it through this jungle, I couldn't stop. There was that "oh just one more try" feeling as I kept getting a little closer.

Of course, eventually I pried myself away. I think I had to eat or something stupid like that. Man, **** eating, why can't we just sit and play video games all day? Wait, no, there's good food, scratch that. Okay, how about **** required eating? In any case, I eventually decided to give Snake, Rattle, N Roll a shot, and this game, oh boy. For one thing, I turned it on and heard the music. And 8 bit or otherwise, a Dave Wise tune is a Dave Wise tune- I could hear it straight away. This game wowed me, I didn't know this kind of thing was even possible in 1991- this kind of pseudo 3D isometric movement. Holy shit. Being limited to four directional controls was something to grapple with for this lazy millennial, but I still found myself having a hell of a lot of fun snaking around this snakey snake world.

But the big moment, was playing Atic Atac. Now, I really like this game. It is like Sabreman, such simple graphics, such a simple premise, but the artistry exactly what it needs to within the Spectrum's parameters to pull you in. This feels like a living (dead), breathing haunted house. And man oh man do I love running around it.But then it happened. I came to one of the things.

Post continued below because this one is too long.

[Monkey Boy 64]

One of those diggity dang wine cellar things!

Yeah, you know the ones!

1881

Yeah, you know, CHEATDONTYOUGOANDTELLHERABOUTTHESECRETINHERCELLAR!

I knew the 1881 barrels in Mad Monster Mansion in BK were an old school Rare reference. I remember reading it on the internet. But then I'm playing Atic Atac and there it is. This connective thread between my Rare and the Rare before my Rare. Suddenly they weren't separate anymore. Sure Sabreman himself could be a connective thread, but he felt like more a special guest appearance by a famous actor. It's a little too on the nose to really bridge the gaps, it's more a "YEAH REMEMBER THIS" where 1883 is something that's just there. When I was a kid I just figured Grunty had some really really figgin' old wine. But seasoned Rare fans knew, they thought, ohohoho, you sneaky bastards.

Now, it sounds weird that seeing something that something else was a reference to is something that blows my mind. It really shouldn't. But seeing this thing in Atic Atac that I knew already from Banjo? It just made it real to me, something tangible, not just some homage to some old game. I suppose in a sense I'd gone full circle... The natural progression of course was Spectrum, N64, Xbox One (and of course anything and everything in between). But I'd gone N64, Xbox One, Spectrum. Into the future and back around. I reached a sort of enlightenment. And what I'd expected to be just some old curiosities were just as much Rareware masterpieces as any Banjo-Kazooie or Donkey Kong Country title. The DNA that has made Rare rare has been with them for decades, and I want to dissect what that DNA really is.

Because really, you have ,say, Banjo and Viva Pinada which are not similar at all in gameplay but are similar in tone and art, Conker and Banjo, similar in art but not in intended audience, more serious business kind of stuff like Perfect Dark, cutesy goofy stuff like Diddy Kong Racing, stuff that falls in between like Kameo, and stuff like Banjo and Donkey Kong, which in terms of tone are really pretty similar but Donkey Kong goes more naturalistic, whereas Banjo goes more fantastical. So what exactly brings all this stuff together? There's a Rareware magic to them all. It isn't googly eyes, though we do all love our googly eyes. What is the magic DNA that connects Sabreman to Snake Rattle and Roll to Banjo to Perfect Dark?

To me, it's the world. That's what really seperates a Rare game from a Nintendo game, or a Sony game, or an Activision game or whatever. When I step into Banjo, I'm stepping into a world that is distinct from any other in gaming, a world of magic, wonder, and whimsy. Beautiful woodland habitats and nasty old witches who want to mess with their residents, and all with a healthy dose of sardonic dry British wit.

Sure with Mario or Zelda or Kirby or anything, I'm stepping into a world as well. But with Rare games, the world I'm stepping into is real. And I don't mean real as in Uncharted 8: You Can See Every Pixel On Every Bacteria On Every Bit of Stubble on Nathan Drake's Chin (no hard feelings, love ya, ND!). I mean real, as in its tangible, it feels like a place that exists, where the characters can truly live and I can waltz in whenever I want to see them. This is true whether it's the beautifully crafted Showdown Town or the simple jungles of Sabreman or the sci fi futurescape of Perfect Dark. When I step into a Rare world, I step in deep.

And at present time, a lot of us are kind of on the fence about Rare as we know them. Sea of Thieves looks good. But there's a lot of talk about "all the good people left," and a lot of skepticism after they spent so many years on Kinect. Many of us wish they were on a new Banjo. A new Conker. New Sabreman. New Pinada, Perfect Dark, what have you. And you know what, time will tell on Sea of Thieves. We'll see.

But I'm left to think. In 1994, Spectrum geeks were probably wondering why the hell Rareware (which is #NotMyUltimatePlayTheGame) were doing with Nintendo's shrivelled up old ape, and by 2000, I'm sure quite a few were wondering what the hell kind of company their one time vidya heroes had become.Where were the top down maze games? The fighting games? All that good shit. What the hell were all these cartoon platformers and scifi shooty things. LAEM. But you know what, there was some nerd in 1998 who played Banjo-Kazooie, and they saw 1881.

And they knew what it meant. They knew this Rare was still theirs. The magic manifests itself differently from game to game. But the soul remains the same.

And perhaps we'll see, say, Snacker the Shark or Roysten the Goldfish or Captain Blackeye- someone who could conceivably show up in Sea of Thieves. It could be our turn to be that nerd who understood 1881 in Banjo-Kazooie.

And perhaps years from now, Rare Replay 50 Year Edition will release for Xbox Seven or whatever. And some doofus, some kid who loved Sea of Theives when it was new, will play Banjo-Kazooie. And they will have that moment of finally experiencing some old school throwback in all its splendor. And they will understand.



I know I'm late to the Rare Replay 30th anniversary shebingbang, but ey, better late than never, eh? It just struck me how much Rare games have impacted me as a person, and how there's a profound something that radiates through most all their games (few misfires, obviously, no one's perfect). Do I sound like a nut? Absolutely, but what can I say, I love what I love. I hope that this next age of Raredom brings joy, laughs, and inspiration to those who seek it just as the days of Banjo did and still do to me, and I thank the folks at Rare for the years and years of inspired game design and may it continue into this new era.

Thank you, good night.