For seasoned industry observers, the only surprise about yesterday's news that Rare founders Chris and Tim Stamper had left the company was that it had taken this long. Yes, Microsoft's 2002 purchase of the company surely represents one of the company's least successful acquisitions. From a return-on-investment standpoint, the Redmond giant spent $375 million to buy Rare from Nintendo (just $25 million less than what it cost to purchase Hotmail), and the results were meager (just five Xbox and Xbox 360 games shipped in five years). Reviews of the titles that did come out were mediocre (average scores well below the nines and tens that greeted Rare's storied Nintendo efforts). Worst of all, the games produced modest sales that paled in comparison to Rare's heyday. (We've long believed that the folks at Bungie, upon learning that stablemate Rare sold for about ten times as much as their company, should have staged a sick out during the making of Halo 2 until Bill Gates coughed up a lot more loot.) Nevertheless, the bleak financials probably aren't the reason the Stampers have moved on. No, it's more likely that their post-purchase employment contracts have finally expired, hence, the standard "leaving to pursue other opportunities" line coming from Microsoft PR.

Yet despite Rare's steady slide into irrelevance, the company's legacy continues to intrigue and inspire even its rivals. During the course of our Playstation 3 reporting last October, we asked Playstation worldwide studios boss Phil Harrison for his thoughts on Rare. Here's our previously unpublished exchange:

This question is a bit separate from your bailiwick, but I've got to take advantage of your insights while I have you here. Being based in the U.K., you're obviously plugged into the local development scene. Why do you think that Rare hasn't been able to regain its former glory?

[Long pause.] Rare is traditionally a very closely held company, a very secretive company. The founders, the Stamper Brothers, almost never gave interviews. They were very private individuals. In fact, before Rare, they had a company called Ultimate, which made games for the 8-bit home computers that were popular in the the 1980s, like the Spectrum and the Commodore 64. I remember that their approach to journalists and reviewers was that if you want to review our game, well, you can go and buy it in the store. They had their own game publisher, that was very successful.

Then they started working for Nintendo, who were themselves a very secretive organization. And so I think that they became quite insular and quite inward-facing, and they missed some of the trends that were going on in the business generally. Now also, if you sell your company to Microsoft and get hundreds of millions of whatevers, currency in the bank, it does tend to defocus management a little bit. But Rare, and prior to Rare, Ultimate, are responsible for some of the best games ever made. And from an industry point of view, I hope they continue to make good games, because they're an inspiration to many of us in the business. I'm sure they'll get their groove back.