Hacker News Reader

Comment by midnightclubbed | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building. As I recall each artist had an SGI Indigo2 and later on the SGI O2 because the standard artist workstation. I believe our lead artist used an SGI Onyx. Programmers had Indy2's with the internal N64 development boards.

There were at least 2 rack mounted SGI machines used for large-scale rendering jobs (ie promotional images, magazine covers etc). May have been SGI Challenges (I know one certainly was) and were kept off-limits to most staff, at the time they were rumored to cost $250k each.

View on HN

>I worked at Rareware in that same era, similarly ridiculous amounts of SGI hardware in the building.

I've always been fascinated with Rareware. For such a tiny studio, the level of quality in the games they put out during that era is completely unparalleled, and many can justifiably still be held up as the greatest ever made.

What was the secret sauce? What was it like working there? How was the culture?

So the secret sauce was... interesting! Unlike any other company I have seen.

Each game team (of which there were 4 who I was there) was isolated from the other teams, only senior management and IT had access to the other team's floors/buildings. If someone from another team needed to visit for some reason we were usually instructed to turn off monitors. There was very little sharing of code and core graphics/gameplay features were fiercely protected by each team. The competition was not other games companies (with the exception of Nintendo) but the team in the next building.

There was almost no recruiting from other games studios, almost everyone was hired out of college (or recently so).

The management (Tim and Chris) generally let the teams do what they thought best and didn't push hard on things like deadlines. Release dates existed but were argued/negotiated with Nintendo when things slipped.

Employees were expected to be in the building at 9am (there was a bonus for punctuality, which I dint think I ever received and was reprimanded about several times). Lunch and dinner were provided, the studio was literally on a farm so there were no lunchtime distractions, and long hours were expected, although not mandated. 70+ hour weeks were not unusual.

Teams got a small bonus for shipping a game but then got a split of game sales (after some 'production cost' was subtracted). The split increased as Rareware negotiated higher payments from Nintendo, for later N64 games the team received something insane like $1 per cartridge, which on a 10-16 person team with millions of sales was crazy money. People were paying cash for houses and Porsches.

Unfortunately while the generous bonuses drove the work culture, it also caused a large amount of resentment. People on shelved projects, projects on low royalty rates (eg Goldeneye), or poor selling products put in the same or more work but did not anywhere near the same fiscal rewards. It was a side effect of Tim and Chris being extremely generous and wanting to do the right thing by the staff but it did cause a number of departures (albeit mostly from the Goldeneye team), I think this has been discussed publicly by many of those folks.

This was fascinating, thanks for sharing.

As an outsider, I believe Rareware's secret sauce was a combination of a can-do, down-to-the-metal, fast-feedback-loop game development style that came from the pre-PC British bedroom game coders, a management team that understood how to manage game development and releases, and Nintendo's coaching on mascot development and general game polishing.

Rareware's talents were big advantages in the early 3D game console era. But by the PS2 / Xbox era, their special skills didn't help as much.

Today I'd say that Epic's Fortnite is the spiritual successor of the old Rareware.

To continue on the similarities, Epic and Rareware also had/have problems with worker burnout. Pretty much every N64 Rareware classic drove at least a few people out of the company. By the time Nintendo and Microsoft got into a bidding war over the company there wasn't much talent left in it[0]. Fortnite is the same way: the fast pace of content churn means people are working constant overtime, and the perpetual nature of the game means there's no release that you're crunching for.

I would disagree that this was good management, though. Burning out your talent is how and why game studios fall apart over time. Had they retained talent and kept crunch time low they probably would have continued churning out hits on the GameCube and Wii instead of stinkers on the Xbox. In fact, Nintendo probably understands this[1] - for example, when Retro Studios imploded they bought them out and immediately banned overtime work at the studio.

[0] Microsoft didn't understand this, and this is why they wound up overpaying for Rare.

[1] Or at least did in the Iwata era. No clue if Kimishima or Fukukawa have the same convictions, but given that Nintendo hired them both internally I imagine they do.

>I would disagree that this was good management, though.

well, "effective" management. Not necessarily good. Seems like a story that pretty much all large gen 5 (and many gen 6) studios share. It was this new cutting edge field right before/after the dotcom bubble requiring (at the time) very niche talent and passion. Perfect formula for burn and churn.

This was likely one of the many thousand cuts the industry faced when moving to the HD era in gen 7. You couldn't just brute force a bunch of assets to work at the expected HD fidelity without stepping back and actually understanding what the machine is doing. You couldn't just have two artists doing everything for asset production; you needed an organized pipeline of specialists. You absolutely needed a producer/manager/director to make sure pieces are fitting together. Huge wakeup call for game developers on software/business practices most other parts of the industry had to employ for years.

If rareware did all that and retained it's talent would they have been able to create the things they did?

> Rareware's talents were big advantages in the early 3D game console era. But by the PS2 / Xbox era, their special skills didn't help as much.

StarFox Adventures on the Gamecube was probably their last "holy crap" game from a technical perspective. There wasn't anything else at the time, on any console, that did realistic-looking fur as good as that game:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/d1/9b/69d19b00eb25ffde0f1d...

It also looked better on a CRT. I still remember getting the GameCube with Star Fox Adventures as my first game for my birthday a few weeks after it came out and just being mesmerized by the graphics. (But I also remember a similar mesmerization when I got an N64 with Super Mario 64, the same TV serviced NES, SNES, N64, GC, and Wii.)

From Martin Hollis' wikipedia page(project head for Goldeneye 007):

> Hollis remarked that he worked non-stop on the game, "[averaging] an 80 hour week over the 2 and a half years of the project", and that the team he recruited was very talented and dedicated even though most of it was composed of people who had never worked on video games.

I guess the answer is insane levels of talent + dedication, and don't worry too much about domain expertise. Probably my favorite factoid out of there is that Goldeneye multiplayer was an afterthought, and basically one dude hacked it together in a couple of weeks at the end of the development cycle.

The Retro Hour (Retro Gaming Podcast):

Rare: The Inside Story - The Retro Hour EP180 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7rX3ZIBoE

The History of Rare - The Retro Hour @ Retrospillmessen Norway 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iuCg_rqVL8

I went to Animation school and learned on Indigo's and O2s for Maya and Softimage... ~1994 -> 1996

Years later when we were collapsing ILM into the new Presidio Campus, the amount of SGI full-rack sized machines being thrown into the trash was insane.

I believe they turned at least one into a keg-erator...

I could have had an opportunity to get one of the cabinets, but I didnt have a place to put it. Wish I had figured out a place to keep one.

The SGI cases were a thing of beauty.

SGI was a key part of some of the most iconic early games (even Nintendo used them!) There isn't much of an emulation scene, probably because of how specialized they were, the weird architecture, and the diversity of workstations. And lots of the old machines were just tossed after they became obsolete. It's a huge shame from a preservation point of view.

Do you mean Power Animator perhaps and not Maya? I believe Maya, Power Animator's successor, came later around ~1998.

Correct! I couldnt recall Alias|Wavefront name when I made that comment... (Alias became Maya)

---

I was focused on Softimage, as I liked the UI better. (Should have picked Alias though)

I read somewhere, recently - from a developer at Rare; who stated that the government was actually concerned as to why this company would have, effectively - a huge cluster of supercomputers, and wanted to make sure they weren’t using them for military stuff, etc.

The interviewer stated they’d laughed and said ‘no, we’re just making video games’. It gave me a giggle, and demonstrates just how advanced these systems were.

Get us another Banjo Kazooie already!

Ha! I'm long gone from Rare and was on a different team... lead designer of Banjo and a number of the engineers/artists are still there I believe so who knows. Dream can come true!

"Dream can come true!" is not a typo, dear readers.

Here is a video, only released decades later, of the SNES game midnightclubbed refers to, which fell by the wayside as the N64 came about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w72kj20YNA0

I was surprised to find my jaw dropping at an SNES game after all this time.

Imagine, this and Super Mario World are the same platform!

Very well. Nuts and Bolts 2 is now entering active development.

Wait a minute.....you are not the person I replied to!

So can we expect a release next week?

Have you missed Yooka-Laylee?

A lot of what I read about Rare talks about insane hours/relatively high turnover in staff. Did you find that to be the case?

That's really cool. :) I wonder if you should share any stories of working at Rareware during that time period?

ohhh i fantasize about being 3d artist / producer in the 90s. i collect whatever I can find from this era. I will make use of my Net Yaroze and release a PS1 game one day!!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com