30 games.

431 achievements.

8500 Gamerscore.

Hundreds of hours.

One year and one week from start to finish.

All for an intangible quantity of bragging rights and accomplished feelings.

I dedicated myself to earning every achievement in 2015’s Rare Replay collection. Why? Because it’s there, and because I love setting huge goals for myself to do “all of X.” What I need to realize is that setting the goal is usually the most fun part. I was new to Xbox until 2021, but I was a fan of Rare’s games on Nintendo systems, my favorite being Banjo-Kazooie. This project seemed like a good way to get my feet wet, catching up on Rare’s output after the Microsoft acquisition while the thrill of popping achievements was still fresh. I basically played each game, in loose chronological order, off and on over 12 months until each of the 200 achievements in the Rare Replay app was mine.

There were lots of moments of genuine fun and equally many of teeth-gritting frustration. Originally, I planned to put some brief writeups of each game on a running list and have that be the end of it. Now, though, I realize that such a journey requires more pomp. It asks for a chronicle unlike any blogging project I have done before: a multi-part epic spanning the first 30 years of the iconic studio’s history.

This is folly, you say. How many times have I seen big blog series go unfinished, you ask condescendingly. Well, folks, I’m here to tell you that I will finish this big blog series. And the reason is extraordinarily simple:

That’s right. The series is already done, dropped all at once for you to binge. More preamble is below, as is the “spoiler” list ranking the games, but first, the links to all of the parts:

PART ONE: Gaming in the Thatcher Years

PART TWO: Get N or Get Out

PART THREE: Live & Rebooted

PART FOUR: Boxed In

PART FIVE: Zero Dark 30 (+330)

PART SIX: The Pinata Game

PART SEVEN: Nuts to this! Let’s Bolt!

PART EIGHT: What Did We Learn?

Now, what are the rules of this challenge?

Rare Replay has 200 achievements, and that’s the goal. But it does get a little messy. Most of the titles included on the collection are emulated within the app, and each has a set of achievements for various milestones. But the remainder of the games were already on Xbox 360, essentially giving you a license to those games through backwards compatibility. This is awesome, but each of those 360 games obviously uses their own set of achievements. When it comes to Rare Replay, all that matters is that we earn 75% of each of those title’s Gamerscore. That’s how we get the stamps needed to upgrade our ticket and earn all of Rare Replay’s rewards. In other words, some achievements in those 360 games will go unearned. That’s a stroke of benevolence on Rare’s part because we often have just enough wiggle room to get by without worrying about achievements that rely on outdated peripherals or long-dormant multiplayer servers. That’s not to say I’m entirely alone, however. For various reasons, a second controller is required to complete this challenge, so I went out and bought one. Imaginary Player 2 was a real MVP during this process, as I will detail later.

What is included in the collection?

Since Rare Replay is a celebration of gaming history, it wouldn’t do to stop at the 30 games. They also added snapshots, which are NES Remix-styled challenges that drop you at save states in the older titles. There are 80 of these, five for every eligible game. There are also snapshot playlists, challenging you to get through a themed group of the snapshots with limited lives. Felling the snapshots is (usually) a piece of cake, and you are showered with Gamerscore for doing so. That’s probably why I was suckered into this situation to begin with. As you progress in the collection’s milestones, you upgrade your ticket with stamps and unlock bonus material to view. This includes developer interviews, concept art showcases, and even teases of projects that were ultimately never given the green light. Viewing these videos was a great reward, and the information colored my thoughts while playing.

Lastly for this section, I want to talk about how well the collection actually represents Rare’s history. The tagline is “30 games for 30 years.” An average of one game every year? That’s a very solid pace of releases. But of course, Rare has made more than 30 games. Wikipedia lists over 100. They put their name on 18 titles in 1990 alone. That’s not counting the dozen or so releases by Rare’s predecessor, the brilliantly named Ultimate Play the Game. Everyone knows that Rare’s work goes far beyond the IP now owned by Microsoft. They were at their arguable peak when working with Nintendo’s characters. Rare was the de facto force behind Donkey Kong, elevating him from a historical arcade icon to a face of cutting-edge 3D technology. They made the follow-up to Star Fox 64, which I would rather not talk about right now. Beyond Nintendo, Rare worked on a veritable heap of other licenses. They spent time on both the kindest and scariest streets in America: Sesame and Elm. They put out two NES games each for Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. The list goes on, including Roger Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, and a little movie called GoldenEye. Obviously, none of this is showing up in Rare Replay. [Future Jeremy edit: Can you tell that I took too long to finish writing this series?]

A bit sadder is the total omission of any handheld releases. Most of Rare’s big console hits had a companion on the popular handheld of the time. These weren’t always inferior ports, either. Conker’s Pocket Tales is actually the first in his series, showing the squirrel before he got his filthy mouth. Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty’s Revenge is an original adventure set between the first and second games. It’s Mr. Pants is a puzzle game starring one of Rare’s less interesting mascots who nonetheless cameos in many of their other releases. None of them are here to play on the Xbox. The platform spread is limited, focusing on the ZX Spectrum, NES, N64, and Xbox 360, with one arcade ROM and original Xbox game rounding it out. I am not complaining here in the least bit. 30 games is a very high number, and few collections can reach it! I’m sure it was hard porting the games over, and ensuring that the then-new backwards compatibility feature worked right must have been tricky. My only point is that Rare Replay is by no means a complete history of the company. Entire swaths of releases were ongoing in the background throughout these 30-odd years, so we need to keep that in mind when we discuss the unfolding narrative.

Enough about what isn’t here. It’s time to start the journey proper with the pixelated era of Rare Ltd.

Massive thanks to the users on trueachievements.com, who are this kind of crazy all the time and had incredible guides every step of the way.

“Spoiler” List ranking all 30 games in the collection:

(I mean, it’s been publicly available for a year, so)