10 CRAZIEST Things Nintendo Has Ever Done
6. Not Purchasing Rare
It would be underselling things to say that Rareware was the best third-party partnership that Nintendo had throughout the nineties. The Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Banjo-Kazooie, Conker's Bad Fur Day - all stone cold classics that put their respective systems on the map, and all released within just a few years of each other.
The two companies went together like chocolate and peanut butter, so naturally, everyone expected Nintendo to either continue their partnership, or perhaps more extreme, buy out Rare and bring their characters into the Nintendo canon.
Yeah that uh, that didn't happen.
Instead, they basically cut Rare loose and left them to be bought out by Microsoft, who didn't really know what to do with them, despite spending millions of dollars on the buyout. Rare were sent them out into the fields of Kinect development for far too long, finally returning with Sea of Thieves in 2016.
Nintendo was under no obligation to buy Rare, but considering that doing so would have likely been nothing but upsides in the long run, I'm pretty sure they'd make much better use of them than Microsoft ever did. it makes the decision to say no to any further projects with the guys behind god damn Donkey Kong Country all the more bizarre.