I remember before the Gamecube launched and there was all this anticipation of Nintendo's next console. Nintendo had what I saw as a dream team of Nintendo themselves, Rare, Retro Studios and Silicon Knights. I was pumped about those partnerships. They seemed ideal since Nintendo's second parties offered a different style than Nintendo themselves. Nintendo could ensure the high quality but the different teams would allow for more variety than what Nintendo would provide on their own.
I remember checking out Silicon Knights' web site once a week just to see if they updated SOMETHING. Eternal Darkness and Too Human just had me all hyped up. They were mature games, they had stories. They seemed to have all the cool elements that Nintendo always seemed to lack. This was how I could get Nintendo quality gameplay in titles that were not cutesy family friendly fare.
Everything turned to ****. Nintendo turned Dinosaur Planet from an interesting new IP to a Star Fox spinoff and then sold Rare off to Microsoft. SK made Eternal Darkness and then instead of Too Human were used as a port house for someone else's game (I love MGS and the Twin Snakes is awesome but probably ANYONE could have made that game). Then they went to Microsoft as well. Only Retro remained of the the "dream team" I envisioned. And the thing is the tools where there. Retro's Metroid Prime games are very un-Nintendo in a good way. Eternal Darkness was much the same way. Rare's Nintendo titles, particularly Perfect Dark and Conker also fit this mold. My hope was that these companies could provide some variety for Nintendo by making games with a very un-Nintendo style but with clear Nintendo gameplay. All three companies demonstrated they could do that.
So it's sad to see SK now making an X-Men game. Pardon me for making the generalization but it's a licenced game by Activision. I assume it will be a nothing title. I used to care a lot about these guys. I used to dream about what sort of titles they would be making with Nintendo at this point. Things went the exact opposite direction I hoped for.
I would say that after the break up of that "dream team" that all four partners are worse off. SK and Rare are pretty much nothing now. Nintendo has found considerable financial success but I have been quite vocal of my dislike of their current direction. I won't go into detail but their golden years are behind them. Only Retro has made it through okay but even then we'll have to see how DKC turns out. They very much made Metroid their own much like how Rare made Donkey Kong their own. But now they've inherited DK and seem to be sticking to Rare's old mold. It seems very similar to how things ended with SK and Rare, working on someone else's franchise like you're Tose or something.
Nintendo's biggest problem is that they have no variety. Same franchises, same family-friendly style, some everything. It's stuffy, corporate and soulless. That was the very problem that this "dream team" of sorts was supposed to fix. When Nintendo broke the team up this is the EXACT end result you would expect.