Rare Replay

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Lore & Background

Rare chose to emulate the original Conker's Bad Fur Day rather than using its Xbox remake Conker: Live and Reloaded (2005), which they felt had strayed too far from the original due to being less lenient on censorship. The nine Xbox 360 releases install directly to the Xbox One dashboard separately from the Rare Replay compilation and require online activation before they can be played offline. The Xbox 360 games share player saved game and Achievement progress between the consoles via Xbox Live's cloud sync features. Rare Replay uses the prior Xbox 360 versions of Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, and Perfect Dark rather than emulating their originals, as the developers realized the various quality-of-life improvements in these remasters were too valuable even to the purists on their staff.

In Their Own Story

The compilation opens with a musical number featuring Rare characters. Each game has a landing page with a variation on its theme music. While the core gameplay remains unedited, Rare added extra features to the older releases. The player can toggle the visual appearance of scanlines and 'rewind' up to ten seconds of gameplay in pre-Nintendo 64 games. The older games can be saved at will and autosave progress upon the player's exit. Rare also added an infinite lives cheat setting for some older games and fixed a game-breaking bug in Battletoads. The 'Snapshots' feature presents small segments of the older games as challenges for the player, such as collecting a target number of points within a time limit in a set scenario, similar in function to the NES Remix series.

Reader's Guide

Rare began work on Rare Replay in October 2014 as a 30th anniversary celebration under the codename 'Pearl', named after the traditional theme of 30th anniversary gifts. The company wanted to do something unique for what they considered a rare milestone in the video game industry and also to celebrate creative director Gregg Mayles's 25th year working at the company. Rare was also influenced by community requests to bring their catalogue to Xbox One, and by the Microsoft backward-compatibility team's progress on the feature. The compilation was one of several celebration ideas, but once it was chosen, the '30 years' theme led to the 30 game limit and US$30 price point. To select the final 30 games, Rare sorted through 120 games in their catalog. One of the biggest technical hurdles was emulating Conker's Bad Fur Day: the N64 game's notorious frame-dropping slowdown was faithfully reproduced, and the team had to wrestle with the original's unusual memory-cartridge save system to make it work on Xbox One. Grabbed by the Ghoulies is the only game in the collection that runs natively rather than through emulation—it was ported to the Xbox One with a higher display resolution and a smoother 60 frames per second.

Did You Know?

• Rare Replay was developed under the codename 'Pearl', named after the traditional theme of 30th anniversary gifts.
• The compilation's 30 game limit and US$30 price point were both chosen to match the '30 years' theme.
• Rare fixed a game-breaking bug in Battletoads for the compilation.
• Grabbed by the Ghoulies runs natively on the Xbox One, as a port upgraded its display resolution and frame rate.
• Licensed games like Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007, and all Mickey Mouse titles were intentionally excluded because Rare wanted to focus on their own original characters and worlds.