Originally posted by: JonathanM
I'm not sure MS got Banjo-Kazooie, as they originated in Diddy Kong Racing.... wonder what the offical word is on all the properties.
Been a lot of news over the gaming boards. Basically what it went like was:
Nintendo had 49%
Had the option to buy Rare entirely, but didn't
Divested out of Rare entirely, but retained certain titles (from what I've seen, they have them all but Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, and Conker)
MS buys Rare in its entirety
Win win for both companies I suppose. Nintendo blames a lack of products from the team. Just weren't contributing. Supposedly Conker64 was a blow out type game where N let Rare do whatever they want. Aftward N told them what games they would be making. Some of the staff had already left (The folks who did Goldeneye had gone on to do Time Splitters). N didn't see a need to keep the company, they owned most of the franchises.
MSFT gets some big titles out of it. Perfect Dark X will be a big product I'm sure. There is speculation that the team is not super happy about being let go from N because all they knew was GC programming and will now have to learn something else.
Again just the news that's been on the gaming sites.