Rare Ltd.

Rare Ltd. (also known as Rare and formerly Rareware) is a British video game company based in Twycross, Leicestershire, formerly working exclusively for Nintendo before being bought out by Microsoft, and the owners of characters such as Banjo and Conker. Before Microsoft bought rights to Rare, they had the rights to Nintendo's Donkey Kong series.

In 2002, Microsoft paid $375 million for a 100% acquisition of Rare. The company then began to produce games for the competing Xbox systems, resulting in the cancellation of Diddy Kong Pilot, Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers, and unofficially, Donkey Kong Racing. Under the terms of the merger, Nintendo retained the rights to all Donkey Kong characters, while Rare maintained the rights to their intellectual properties.

However, they continued to develop games for Nintendo's handheld systems, since Microsoft has not entered the handheld console market. Such games included enhanced remakes of the three SNES Donkey Kong Country games for the Game Boy Advance and Diddy Kong Racing DS, as well as redeveloping their cancelled Diddy Kong Pilot and Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers games into Banjo-Pilot and It's Mr. Pants, respectively.

Appearances in the Donkey Kong series

 * Dixie Kong and Timber's hats once had Rareware logos on them.
 * In Donkey Kong 64, Rareware, along with Nintendo, sponsor the boxing match between the Kongs and King K. Rool as mentioned by the Microbuffer. Also, it is possible to collect a Rareware Coin by beating Cranky's score in Jetpac, and a Golden Banana with Rare's logo on it by collecting all of the Banana Fairies.
 * In Diddy Kong Racing DS, the coins have the logo of Rare on it.

Trivia

 * Even though Rare has cut ties with Nintendo, their company name, written as "Rare Limited", appears in the Sound Test of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS / Wii U as the original composers of several Donkey Kong songs, although the information clarifies that Nintendo fully owns the copyright to the compositions.