UNCHARTED WATERS

Rare strikes out into the unknown to make a multiplayer game that’s true to its heritage

Rare is, in the best possible way, out of its depth. The maker of Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007 and Viva Piñata used to be fiercely insular, operating behind tightly locked gates in its remote Twycross country estate. Its latest game, however, marks something of a sea change for the studio. Sea Of Thieves is the antithesis of anything that has ever fit onto a cartridge or between four walls, a sprawling multiplayer title hoping to connect players all over the world via a single shared pirate fantasy adventure. It is designed to be accessible to everyone, to generate genuine and unique stories of competition and cooperation between all kinds of players – and to thrive as a community-led creation in the ‘games as a service’ model that has become a staple of the contemporary game industry. Needless to say, the gates are now open.

“For me, it feels like we’re transforming the studio,” PC design lead Ted Timmins says. “Historically, Rare never did press, it never had a community. There was nothing around that type of thing. And now we’ve had to open the doors. There are no guard dogs anymore – genuinely, there used to be guard dogs.” Walk into Rare’s studio reception today and you’ll spot a huge television hung on the wall to your right, cycling through live Twitch feeds of streamers playing Sea Of Thieves. It is perhaps the first thing you’d see in the morning as an employee walking into the office: the game you’re working on, already in the hands of the players who will establish it. The screen is made up of four smaller televisions, panes in a window to the outside world. This time, Rare is looking out at it. Executive producer Joe Neate pulls out his phone and brings up a graph of

Sea Of Thieves’ Google search term numbers. “This,” he says, indicating a blip on the screen, “was this year’s E3. And this” – he points to a spike around ten times as big – “was our closed beta.”