Earlier this week, Rare celebrated its 40th anniversary. The studio has delivered multiple hits and memorable experiences over the years, so what better time to reflect and share our favorite Rare games? Question: What’s your favorite Rare game? Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest - Ozzie Mejia, Senior Rare Guy Rare's had gems throughout the ages and I've loved its games from every era, whether you're talking about R.C. Pro-Am, the original Killer Instinct, GoldenEye 007, or Sea of Thieves. Of course, I truly came to love Rare for what they did with the Donkey Kong Country series taking the Super Nintendo to places it was never really supposed to go. Games at that time were not supposed to look like Donkey Kong Country with fully rendered character models. Games were not supposed to look that good on the Super Nintendo, but Donkey Kong Country was a primate pioneer. However, while Donkey Kong Country was good, the sequel truly excelled in every way. Diddy's Kong Quest is a treasure of incredible platforming, brilliant level design, secrets all over the place, and just a pure sense of fun and enjoyment. It's a masterpiece that still holds up to this day, partly because of a soundtrack that goes down as one of the best of all time. BattleToads - TJ Denzer, Senior Fan of Fighting Amphibeans I've often been a person of simple tastes. BattleToads, in many ways, applied to all of those tastes. It was gross. It was goofy. It let me hit my friends with a stick, devolving the run into a non-stop life-consuming brawl of revenge. However, I also liked the difficulty. Did I ever beat the bike part? Nope, but I sure did like trying. The problem is I always played with friends because it was that kind of fun, but at the bike part, if one died, you both lost. BattleToads sure was warty, but it was also a blast and began my affections for Rare. R.C. Pro-Am - Asif Khan, Nintendo Entertainment System Owner While I could have picked the iconic Diddy Kong Racing, I think Rare’s truly classic racing game franchise deserves more love than it gets. R.C. Pro-Am’s isometric camera helped to create a truly unique racing game experience on the 8-bit NES console. Challenging gameplay and solid music helped create a solid game all the way back in 1988. Rare and Nintendo truly made great games together, and R.C. Pro-Am is a hidden gem that I wish could find new life in the 2020s. Sea of Thieves - Bill Lavoy, Shackmaps Overlord Those who know me know that I’m into survival games. Open world experiences, both co-op and single player. Sea of Thieves remains among the top games I’ve played with friends over the last decade. It’s exactly what my group and I look for, and it’s my favorite Rare game, even though there are a lot of bangers in their catalog. Perfect Dark - Sam Chandler, dataDyne #1 Employee Rare has so many good games that it’s downright cruel to be forced into picking one. I adore Banjo-Kazooie and wish we got more of those games. I spent hundreds of hours playing multiplayer in GoldenEye 007. Even Sea of Thieves stands as a favorite of mine, having spent hundreds of hours sailing around the seas with my wife. But I will always have a soft spot for Perfect Dark. It’s just a better GoldenEye game. It’s got a strong story, fantastic weapons with alt-fire modes, plenty of gadgets and tools, and each campaign mission is so unique. Plus it had vehicles! Truly ahead of its time. I don’t think I’ll forgive Microsoft for canceling the reboot. Perfect Dark - Dennis White Jr., has the worst aim with the Farsight This decision was hard at first because I put plenty of hours into GoldenEye 64 basically running around being a dick with Oddjob and using other shenanigans. But I’m leaning towards Perfect Dark being my favorite Rare game because I love some good Sci-Fi and put so much time into the game solo with the cool campaign missions on top of the multiplayer fun with my friends and siblings.The weapons were awesome but so were the gadgets. Yes the Farsight was ridiculous but best believe it didn’t ruin the fun for me. The Reaper and Callisto MTG were some favs. The Super Dragon with the grenade launcher always felt great to use. Dual wielding the Phoenix pistols made me feel so badass. Perfect Dark is one of those games that hit a real sweet spot in a way that is hard to duplicate and was one of the earliest FPS games that I remember playing in the same room with other people and thinking “How does life get better than this?!” Perfect Dark Zero - Donovan Erskine, 2000s kid I’m well aware that Perfect Dark is widely recognized as the superior game in the series, but I was not privy to that in 2005, nor would it have mattered to my seven-year-old brain. I loved playing first-person shooters on my Xbox 360, and Perfect Dark Zero was my favorite sci-fi game outside of the Halo series. Joanna Dark was a cool protagonist, and her arsenal of weapons and gadgets were unlike anything in the other shooters I was playing. Would love to see a sequel some day. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest - Steve Tyminski, Monkeys, Bear and Bird oh my! This is such a tough question because Rare has had some great games over the years. I think this a toss up between Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. DKC2 has some of the best music in video games and it took the Donkey Kong Country series in a darker direction as compared to the first SNES game. I could sit for hours listening to Donkey Kong Country 2 music like the boss battle theme and Funky’s Flights.The platforming in the game is really solid too. As for the other game in question, Banjo-Kazooie is one of my favorite games too. It also has some of the best music in video games. The level design and platforming is really good as well. Banjo-Kazooie was one of the first collect-a-thon games and what that means is that there is a whole lot of stuff to collect. You have puzzle pieces, red/gold feathers, Cheato pages, eggs, Jinjos and all kinds of other things in each level. This is a really tough question to answer but I think I have to go with Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest just ahead of Banjo-Kazooie. I think we can all agree that Rare Replay should have been on Switch already and should be on Switch 2. That and Rare being sold to Microsoft was one of the all-time worst business decisions. Those are our favorite games from Rare's four decades of history. There are a lot of great games that we didn't mention, so let us know what your favorites are in the Chatty!