Rare Ltd. Developing for DS

Well, if you don't know the background of Rare Ltd., let me fill you in. It was a company developing software exclusively for Nintendo as a second party as early as the Nintendo Entertainment System days, creating hit titles like Donkey Kong Country for SNES. In 2002 however, Microsoft bought Rare out for an estimated two hundred fifty million dollars, and games were made such as Conker: Live and Reloaded and Grabbed by the Ghoulies. Development on Perfect Dark Zero for Xbox 360 is currently in progress. (The game was supposed to be a GameCube title at one point in time.) Rare has made remakes of earlier games for Nintendo on the Game Boy Advance, but otherwise it's been strictly Microsoft, until the they got their hands on a DS development kit (for research purposes of course, but that's all changed now).

It started out as a rumor, which Rare denied a few months ago, claiming to be putting all of its effort on the Xbox and Xbox 360; but just recently the studio put two adverts on their website looking for 3D artists and producers, with big "(NINTENDO DS)" text to the right of it. Now it appears that the 3D artist add has been taken off, leaving just a producer ad.

Seeing as Nintendo's handhelds have been its main source of revenue, it would not seem likely that Microsoft would allow this, but if you think about it, Xbox is the only console that has not had a handheld released as of yet, so maybe aligning itself with Nintendo won't be a bad idea. No information has been released about what games are in the process of being made, but just like they did with Game Boy Advance, a good guess would be sequels or remakes of N64 titles such as Banjo Kazooie, Killer Instinct or even the original Perfect Dark.

NinBit will keep you updated as the news surfaces.