Activision almost bought out Rare in 2002 that would've resulted in giving Rare freedom to develop on any platform instead of being bound to one console. Head inside for the full scoop...

Back in the N64 era, Rare created marvels such as Golden Eye, Perfect Dark, Donkey Kong 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day with the list going on. But it turns out Activision put in a bid for Rare that would have resulted in giving Rare more freedom to develop for the hardware that was available instead of being bound as a 1st party developer.

Now Ed Fries who was the previous vice president of game publishing at Microsoft has shed some light on what happened back in 2002. Microsoft ended up paying a total that came to $375 million for Rare, which is speculated to be so high due to the competition from Activision and a strategy by Nintendo, even though Nintendo expressed interest in also buying out Rare.

Ed mentioned that at the time Nintendo owned roughly about half of Rare and had the option of buying the other half but Nintendo kept letting the deadline of the purchase expire without doing anything, which allowed others to compete in the bid for Rare. This meant that if a party were to put in a bid, Nintendo would be able to match that and still have priority, so to counter this, both Activision and Microsoft put in big bids so Nintendo wouldn't match their price. This competition added up to the total of $375 million.

It was revealed that Activision had actually won the bidding war and far into the deal something occured that resulted in the deal not working out, allowing Microsoft to step in and purchase Rare instead. And since the price for the developers where so high, Fries said:

"The prices were getting so high, by this point, that it didn't look like Nintendo was willing to participate."

So with Activision backing out, Microsoft took majority control of Rare.