In this day and age, logos are a fickle thing, companies going through them like clean underwear in the constant search for "reinvention". This week, one of the oldest developers in the industry has broken down and joined in.

Rare Software, known for GoldenEye, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark and the Xbox 360's avatars, has this week unveiled not one new logo, but four, designed to celebrate the company's 25th birthday by having "a new image more in keeping with an innovative and creative entertainment company which aspires to be around for at least the next 25 years!".

The old one lives on slightly in the tiny "R" in the top right, but for the most part, the coloured bubbles and new "Rare" font are an all-new look.

I bring this up because, as someone with a strange fetish for this stuff, Rare's old logo - and indeed entire image - had been, like Pearl Jam and Nic Cage, forever stuck in the 1990s. A time to remember, yes, but also a time long past.


With Rare now looking awfully 21st century, the ranks of the 20th century game logos are growing thin. Off the top of my head, the only notable ones surviving are the Sony Computer Entertainment logo (which looks equally "90s"), Nintendo's (though it's been updated slightly) and a few Japanese publishers like Capcom and Sega.

Rare ditches gold logo for new look [Develop]