Despite being gobbled up by Microsoft back in 2002, Rare remains one of the most important and loved developers in the Nintendo scene to this day. For years, the studio created classic after classic – games like Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie instantly spring to mind – and the company logo was commonly found gracing our screens as we loaded up our favourite titles.
Amazingly, though, we never realised just what the logo actually was. We assumed, as we’re sure many of you reading this would have done, that the logo is simply a letter ‘R’, but it turns out that it’s actually a “golden toilet roll” created by ex-Rare artist Kevin Bayliss.
You can see the old “toilet paper” logo and the newer ‘R’ logo below.
The video below shows the cinematic intro for Conker: Live & Reloaded which released on Xbox in 2005. If you watch from around the 40 second mark, you’ll notice that the Rare logo actually fades into a toilet roll on screen. We can already sense comments flying in saying “well duh, this was obvious”, but we’re sure there are plenty of people out there who never made the connection.
If there was ever an interesting bit of gaming trivia worth showing off to your friends, we’d say this is probably it.