This week we spoke to Studio Head of Rare, Craig Duncan about the future of Rare.
Throughout we discuss E3, Rare Replay, backwards compatibility and much more.
ICXM: Are all 30 games in Rare Replay accessible through one interface, similar to Halo: The Master Chief Collection?
Craig: Yes but more playful than the cool look of Halo, we used a theatre and stage theme that literally puts the characters and worlds on the stage and celebrates them, from the moment the opening movie starts you travel down the atrium to a fun song about Rare Replay (composed and sung by the team) the atrium features gold framed pictures on the walls showing each of the games – these are what you access each game through these pictures – when you do, each game has its own lovingly crafted stage showing you the characters and telling you about the game and controls – this is where you launch the game from and jump into the fun – holding down the menu button during play gets you back to the game stage.
ICXM: How long have you had to keep Rare Replay a secret? (How long have you known about the game?)
Craig: We started the project last year out of a conversation about how we would celebrate 30 years of Rare, we had other ideas but this was the one we got REALLY excited about – particularly giving a whole collection of Rare games to existing and new fans as well as videos featuring origin stories of some of the games and more as told by the original developers!
ICXM: How easy or difficult was it for Rare to adapt to the Xbox One’s architecture and develop for the console?
Craig: We know the Xbox One very well as we shipped Kinect Sports Rivals which was close to launch, we also work closely with the Xbox teams to make the developer platform continuously improve, that team is awesome and always happy to get feedback and improve things for all developers. Rare Replay had some specific development challenges as a multi-generational compilation with some old source code and archives but we have wicked smart engineers that eat those kind of challenges for breakfast!
ICXM: Will there be any utilisation of the new backwards compatibility feature for Xbox One with Rare Replay?
Craig: Yes, the X360 titles in the collection were made possible through the same technology so we collaborated closely with that team, another group of wicked smart developers!
ICXM: Are there any plans currently for a Windows 10 version of Sea of Thieves or Rare Replay?
Craig: Sea of Thieves we have already confirmed for Windows 10 and Xbox One. Rare Replay we only have Xbox One plans but actually many people have asked about a Windows 10 version which is interesting but no current plans for this.
ICXM: How big was it for Rare as a studio to finally unveil Sea of Thieves (a new IP) and Rare Replay at E3 this year?
Craig: This E3 was HUGE for us as a studio, it has been our plan internally since last year that we wanted to celebrate our heritage with Rare Replay and then announce our new IP with Sea of Thieves – we also wanted to align our new Logo design (a fusing of classic and future Rare) as well as a new studio website, the Rare Replay Xbox.com site and a Sea of Thieves Website – We did all of this and timed it all to E3, this was an incredible, high quality, coordinated achievement from my world class team with some great support from the wider Xbox team. The parts that please me most is it was a genuine surprise to fans what we were doing and the reaction has been amazingly positive to everything Rare which is a humbling public endorsement of the Rare story and transition we felt passionately about inside the studio.
ICXM: How a game looks and plays is fairly controversial for some gamers – what is Rare’s aim for resolution and frame rate with Rare Replay? (for the games that are being remade)
Craig: It actually varies game to game as we have taken a different approach to get each game in the collection represented the way you remember them, something like the original Xbox Grabbed by the Ghoulies we remastered completely into 1080p and 60fps as the games cartoon art style worked well (cutscenes are still in 4:3 as the original), the Xbox 360 games are in their native resolutions and frame rates as they are already HD, the older titles we made the call to put them in an arcade style themed windowed mode to retain the authenticity, we also added a CRT filter that accurately reproduced the scan lines and pixel bleed screens gave back then which you can toggle on and off – We did whatever made the most sense to keep the quality high and the nostalgia present – the games play as you remember them, we embraced this goal.
ICXM: How do the 10,000 achievement points in Rare Replay break down into the 30 individual games? Will some games have to include more achievement points than others?
Craig: You’ll have to play to discover the exact splits but roughly 6k are in the X360 titles, and 4k shared between the rest – So some games do have more but it’s very cool that you can play a game originally made in the 80’s and earn achievement points for discovering gaming history!
ICXM: Finally, a tough one.. what is your favourite Rare game of all-time?
Craig: That is tough and from talking to our fans, everyone has a different favourite Rare Game… My earliest Rare memory is Battletoads, As a Gamer Teenager in 1991 and being drawn into the difficulty and challenge of it as well as the fun of the characters. What also impressed me was how many different games it seemed to be, Beat-em up / platformer / racer – I’m also a fan of our Banjo and Viva Piñata franchises (sorry that’s 6 games) :).
From all at ICXM, we’d like to say a huge thanks to Craig for catching up with us!
What Rare Replay title are you going to start with? Hit the comments below!
