We know why Rare went with Microsoft: the Stamper brothers were ready to retire from the gaming industry
We know why Microsoft bought them: They needed more 1st party devs for their first video game console and Nintendo refused to be purchased by them
but why did Nintendo sell Rare? Why didn't Nintendo buy Rare's other 50% and keep them?
Iwata said that if he got promoted to president before the buyout, Rare would’ve never been sold
Because Rare's games didn't sell very well towards the end. Perfect Dark was vastly less successful than GoldenEye, Banjo Tooie was vastly less successful than Banjo Kazooie etc.
There's no way he ever said that
Jealousy. What are the best games of the N64 era? What ever comes to mind is probably a rare game. You see Rare was consistantly outdoing Nintendo even at their own games. Rare could pump out good games at twice the rate Nintendo could. Simply put Nintendo got rid of them for being too good. Rare made Ninte do look bad so they sold them as punishment. Nintendo couldnt make a good Star Fox to save the company. DKC2 is better than any yoshi and mario on snes. Thats how it started.
Pretty shitty excuse considering those games were released in the twilight years of the N64 when interest in the console was wanning.
It wasn't just Rare games that were selling less, something like Majora's Mask was also vastly less successful than Ocarina of Time, because it came out in like 2000.
And Dinosaur Planet was a poor man's OoT that only sold any copies because they sacrificed StarFox to do so.
I actually believe that was the case. Japanese people don't like to "lose".
Also, it was sold for 300 millions at the time. That would be around 600 millions today. No game company has this value, unless it's one of the giants. And Rare wasn't giant at the time. Not only that, but the game industry was much smaller.
Nintendo didn't sell Rare. Microsoft bought it because they thought they own Donkey Kong.
Are you retarded
That's from the Conker commentary where Seavir said ONE MS employee looked at one of Rare's promotional material and thought they owned DK because he was featured among the rest of their cast. No company would get involved with a 300 million dollar deal without fully being aware of what they're getting in return.