Paul Machacek

You’re welcome

Yeah someone “got lucky”!

Glad you’re still playing 😀 It’s crazy but DKL was the article of the day on Wikipedia yesterday, however they got the launch dates wrong. I handed over the final build somewhere around late June or early July and it would have taken some weeks to manufacture and ship to stores. Have Fun

Welcome to Rare Official website of video game studio Rare, part of Xbox Game Studios and developer of Sea of Thieves

Well we’re hiring www.rare.co.uk

Hey folks, please support for a good cause www.instagram.com/reel/DE7mVMu...

Happy New Year everyone. It’s funny but this time a quarter of a century ago people were fearful of the possible consequences of the Y2K bug, social media wasn’t a thing and you had to take roles of film to a shop to get your 24/36 pictures. Good luck with the next 25

“A nebulous release” LoL. Happy New Year Hyle :-)

…Banjo Kazooie said that he burst out laughing quite noticeably in the barn when he read comments i had left for Chris Sutherland in the codebase. I’d written them ~17 years earlier but recalled them clearly when he related them to me. He said he had found it interesting how we had coded things BITD

One the the great things that happened was the fun discoveries that the newer members of Rare, people who had grown up on these games, had when they examined the source code. For some this was a holy grail, but full of the unseen side of Rare creativity and comedy. One engineer who was working on…

…and rediscovered a ton of stuff we’d forgotten about. So there was a WW1 biplane dogfighting idea called “Fokker” that re-emerged. Wrestlerage on SNES that @kevbayliss.bsky.social & i noodled on in 1992 inbetween Battletoad games resurfaced as well. Super Battletoads finally came back.

There was also a huge effort to get the games back. Seriously, we found 3.5inch and 5.25inch discs in wet cardboard boxes in a shed at Rare that had not been touched since the 1990s or even mid 1980s. We bought old PCs and drives from eBay to read the. We’d got back 95%+ of what we had…

We had a wall at Rare with a marker on it for every single game from Ultimate/Rare. They had to be whittled down. The conversations included “That’s a classic”, “That one is a reskin of the 1st”, “That one we can’t do as we don’t own it”, “that one is not worth it”, “those two are a bit 5h1t3”. Lol

It was a fantastic experience for so many reasons; the love the team had for the catalogue of games, revisiting some of my Ultimate Play The Game Favourites, the technical challenges of bringing these games back and the love for presenting them and bringing something new, a true homage

Now that we’re here, that Mr Pants video was part of the video archive we produced around the Rare Replay project; 30 games from 30 years for 30 dollars. We were working on that loving compilation 10 years ago and it released in 2015, so we’re running close to 10 years since launch.

YouTube video by Rare Ltd Rare Revealed: The Making of It's Mr. Pants

And just as a reminder this is what we thought of it youtu.be/CLJAVWMI1F4?... Always loved Justin’s 1st bit where he realised that he’d have to justify the madness for the world to see

Going from a playable demo that i knocked out in a few hours in 1999 to it’s final “release” 5yrs later (with other stuff happening in between) was tortuous but I’m glad we did it. Rare; bringing the world games it doesn’t have. The folks who worked on this are very proud of it. Happy Birthday Pants

A character in a yellow cloak stands near a deer-like creature. They're both looking towards a tree decorated in lights, where another creature and character stand. Strands of light are seemingly moving towards or away from the tree. Words read "Happy Holidays from Rare".

Happy holidays, whoever's seeing this! Hope you're closing the year out in style and, as it's the day of fine gifts and finer food, here's our offering - a delicious png for you to enjoy! Right, we're off to eat a Patagotitan's hypothesised weight in sweets. 'Til 2025!

Yesterdecades! But very generous sentiment all the same.

YouTube video by tony713elo Renaissance - Northern Lights (1st TOTP appearance, 1978) HD

God i miss the 1970s youtu.be/z-QidYXYpig?...

Go for it folks. I did my best here but it’s getting harder to recall stuff we did a long time ago. Retro Gamer is a great mag so please go and support

You didn’t have to think back almost 20 years to answer Darran’s questions for this article, lol. Honestly folks it’s getting harder. Many years and many games to recall

Give me a single image of a film that immediately makes you hear the song from the soundtrack in your head

The irony is not lost on me

Ok, apologies, got busy & had a bit of a break from this thread, will try to pick it up again soon. I was going to move from Dawnssley to an earlier game i wrote call Darkwurlde & touch on the influences that Ultimate & early Genesis albums had on me at this time.

….my software to ensure the map didn’t scroll too fast both because the screen was blurry but also to ensure background characters could load to VRAM in time. So i think i put an artificial scroll speed limit in & if DK accelerated down too fast with gravity then he’d go off bottom of screen IIRC

No, maps/graphics all held on ROM cart and streamed to VRAM as fast as it could to ensure a quick seamless scroll, exactly how it was also done on NES & SNES. Thinking about it more now (sorry, vague, 30 years ago) there would have been a “max scroll speed” imposed by software…..

Erm, looks like it may be a bug. Sorry. It should have scrolled the screen quickly and you should have landed ok in my opinion today

Also, the game doesn’t look the way we wanted it on that original blurry LCD screen. The sharpness here makes it look too bitty.