Rare Back Catalogue Heading to XBLA ?
Categories: Microsoft, Nintendo
Written By: Daniel Roswell
Rumours have been flying all over the internet regarding Rare’s back catalogue of games.
If these rumours are true then the games above could be making their way to the Xbox Live Arcade any time soon, this has upset a lot of Nintendo fans because they were holding out for Virtual Console releases.
Microsoft’s acquisition of Rare back in 2002 caused an awful lot of geek rage, with loyal fans threatening to boycott Rare because of the move. In reality Rare could never have been sold without an agreement with all three parties, which there was. The 49 % majority stake, which Nintendo owned was sold to Microsoft for $375 million along with the rights to all Rare games, except Nintendo owned IPs.
Nintendo walked away from the deal $375 million richer and with Donkey Kong, Star Fox (which as theirs anyway) and characters designed by Rare for these games like, Diddy Kong and Cranky Kong for the DK series and Krystal for the Star Fox series, Microsoft and Rare got to keep everything else.
With Rare still working on Nintendo handhelds it seemed plausible to believe that other Nintendo published games could either get released on the DS or on Nintendo’s VC. The fact of the matter is of course, that Nintendo only published these games on previous systems and have no say as to how these titles are now used and any possibility of retaining these rights were sold.
No matter how much I would love to see these on the Virtual Console the possibility is very unlikely.
***UPDATE***
No sooner than I finish this post, I find out that there is a potential fly in my above theory in the form of a secret Goldeneye ten year anniversary edition for XBLA. This special edition was apparently blocked by none other than Nintendo, in a “if we can’t have Goldeneye, then nobody can” stance and in the process managed to kill the chances of it ever being re-released on any platform.
This is all rumour and will never be confirmed officially, but here is what looks like a screen shot of the XBLA Goldeneye and a link to the original post
