Tim and Chris Stamper, the founders of Rare, are famously secretive and have only ever given a few interviews over the past few decades. They spoke to EDGE magazine in the late '90s when development on GoldenEye 007 was in full swing, and Tim Stamper would speak to MCV in 2015 after accepting a 'Development Legend' award on behalf of the siblings.
Beyond that, the pair have remained elusive and (to our knowledge, at least) have only ever given one video interview – to Adam Doree, founder of Kikizo.
Doree is a veteran of the games media industry and is currently employed as Vice President, ZD Global Partners & VP International, IGN at Ziff Davis in the US. Earlier in his career, he was one of the first to hold video interviews with famous figures in the world of gaming, including Satoru Iwata, Shigeru Miyamoto and Kaz Hirai – and was lucky enough to secure an interview with the Stampers following the announcement at the X02 event that Microsoft was buying Rare in 2002 for $375 million.
Doree is in the process of remastering and republishing many of his old video interviews, and his chat with Tim and Chris Stamper has just been reissued.
"Rare is obviously one of the most beloved game developers of all time — they made Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark, Banjo Kazooie, Conker and much more — but it was also one of the most secretive, and famous for never doing interviews," Doree explains. "So this interview with Rare really IS rare, because it’s one of the only interviews the Stampers have ever done — possibly the only interview they've ever done together — and certainly seems to still be the only video interview with them in existence, anywhere online. And it’s been that way for over 20 years now."
The interview covers a lot of topics, from Rare's new relationship with Microsoft to its amicable separation from Nintendo, all the way up to the studio's aspirations for online play and its delight at the Xbox development environment. Chris also drops a hint about the return of Sabreman, a character from the Ultimate Play The Game days, who would indeed return in Sabre Wulf on the Game Boy Advance in 2004.
"The interview itself is a totally new, more coherent edit with FULL AV restoration from what was fairly problematic source material but kept in my archives for the past two decades," Doree explains. It's well worth a watch, even if you saw it 20 years ago when it was originally published.
The Stampers left Rare in 2007, and would subsequently invest in FortuneFish, a mobile game studio founded in 2013 by Tim Stamper's son, Joe. More recently, Tim has been posting on social media about Rare's games and its history.