games™ takes a behind the scenes look at Rare's classic beat em up Killer Instinct

RARE. TO A GAMER that name means quality. To an English gamer it means ‘One of our flagship claims to the world’s gaming industry’, such is the acclaim that the company from Twycross, Leicestershire, has earned over the years. It has consistently delivered games of the highest calibre. Be it the 1984 release of Sabre Wulf, the 1997 FPS legend that is GoldenEye, or the upcoming platformer Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Yet there was a time, when the company’s future was in doubt. When the Stamper brothers sold Ultimate Play The Game back in 1985, and abandoned the Spectrum – a platform they had set alight within their first three years as a company – to take on the new and then un-proven Famicom, fans were left shaking their heads. Faced with an unlimited budget from Nintendo and tasked with developing games back home on a system few British people could even afford, Rare got into the business of licensed games and ports.

Though the constant string of NES releases brought in huge profits, Rare had lost its innovation and was in danger of becoming just another developer. Its best chance of breaking the mould and keeping ahead of the game lay in 16-bit consoles. If Rare wanted to win big, it had to risk big. And so it was that the company cut back its production and exchanged the massive profit it had garnered from the NES into the production of Silicon Graphics workstations. This move made Rare the most technologically advanced developer in the UK, but what would it do with this newfound power?

“It was the golden age of fighting games,” says Chris Tilston, gameplay programmer and lead designer on Killer Instinct. “They were more popular at that time in the arcades than they had ever been, and we were all big fans. It just made sense to enter this market with what people were playing most.” And therein lay the main competition for all beat- ’em-ups at the time.

Although Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat had brought unprecedented popularity to the genre, they had also set the basis for all that was to come. As a whole string of titles proved, differentiating a game from the two giants was far from easy. Whereas other genres benefit from the numerous ways in which they can distinguish themselves, the beat-’em-up is incredibly closed-set: story means nothing, environment means little. Great gameplay is essential, of course, but it’s difficult to market a game on something so intangible. If there is one element of the beat-’em-up genre that can be communicated easily it is the characters, so that’s where Rare began.

“A prototype started back in June 1993,” explains Tilston, “when Mark Betteridge [now studio head] had a couple of boxers [one of which became TJ Combo], which lead artist Kevin Bayliss had modelled on screen, running on Rare’s old arcade hardware. Initially the theme was one of ‘street punks’, where the characters were more based in reality – a basketball player, for example – but we changed this to more fantastical characters that would make the game stand out. Things that might have been familiar but you hadn’t seen before in the context of a fighting game, grounded by some more traditional characters.” By Christmas the game’s personalities had been designed and modelled, and animation tests had begun with an early motion-capture system.

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