Rare: GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie and the N64 Golden Age

For a golden stretch in the 1990s, a small studio in the English countryside made some of the best games in the world. Rare, founded by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, were technical magicians: they made the Super Nintendo look next-generation with Donkey Kong Country, they turned a movie licence into GoldenEye 007, the game that proved a first-person shooter could work brilliantly on a console, and they built Banjo-Kazooie, one of the warmest, cleverest 3D platformers ever made. For years, a Rare logo on the box was a guarantee of quality.

This is the studio's run: the Donkey Kong revolution, the GoldenEye breakthrough, the platforming classics, and the long journey from Nintendo to Microsoft. Here is the map.

The British wizards of Twycross

Rare's superpower was technology in service of charm. From their base in the English countryside, the Stamper brothers assembled a team that squeezed impossible things out of Nintendo's hardware: the pre-rendered, almost 3D look of Donkey Kong Country on a Super Nintendo, the ambitious worlds of Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark on the N64. But the tech always served warmth, wit and a very British sense of humour, never more so than in the gleefully crude Conker's Bad Fur Day. Few studios have ever been this technically fearless and this funny at once.