For more than three decades, Gregg Mayles occupied an unusual place in video game history. He did not simply spend his career at one famous studio, nor did he become known for a single successful series before moving elsewhere. Instead, Mayles entered Rare when console games were still being created by remarkably small teams, became one of the company’s earliest dedicated game designers, helped redefine Donkey Kong for an entire generation, guided the project that eventually became Banjo-Kazooie, experimented with everything from living piñata gardens to motion-controlled sports, and later became one of the senior creative figures behind Sea of Thieves.
Few designers experienced so many transformations of the video game industry while remaining at essentially the same creative home.
Mayles joined Rare in 1989 when he was only eighteen years old, arriving directly from school rather than from another development studio or an established career in programming or art. He entered the company through its testing department and spent his earliest professional years playing games, looking for problems, and learning how the pieces of a game behaved when placed in the hands of an actual player. Years later, Mayles remembered spending roughly two years in testing before managing to move into design, while an autobiographical professional profile described the progression with characteristic understatement, noting that he joined Rare as a game tester and somehow became the studio’s first dedicated game designer.
That beginning is important because Mayles did not arrive at Rare with a reputation already established elsewhere. Rare was where he learned to make games, where he developed his ideas about what game design should accomplish, and where he would remain long enough to see both the company and the medium change almost beyond recognition.
From Game Tester to Game Designer
When Mayles entered Rare, professional game design was not yet the clearly defined occupation it would later become. Development teams were small, job responsibilities frequently overlapped, and many of the people building commercial video games had learned through personal experimentation rather than specialized university programs or established industry career paths.
Testing therefore gave Mayles an unusually practical education. Instead of beginning with formal theories about player motivation or level structure, he spent his earliest professional years repeatedly interacting with games, identifying weaknesses, watching mechanics fail, and seeing how seemingly small decisions could change the experience of the person holding the controller. The lessons were immediate because a game either responded well to the player or it did not, and no amount of attractive artwork could completely disguise a weak interaction.
That concern with what the player was actually doing became one of the most persistent threads in Mayles’s later discussions of design. During the Tales From Twycross developer panel, he talked about the games he wished he had worked on at Rare and identified Killer Instinct as particularly interesting because fighting games place enormous pressure on their mechanics. A fighting game cannot depend on scenery alone. If controlling the characters does not feel right, the entire experience suffers. Mayles connected that observation to his own long-standing focus on what he regarded as the core player experience.
It was a revealing comment from a designer whose later career would include enormous three-dimensional environments, colorful characters, complicated simulations, motion control, and persistent online worlds. Beneath all of those layers, Mayles continued returning to the same underlying question: what was the player actually being asked to do, and was doing it enjoyable?
His first major opportunities to answer that question arrived during Rare’s early years working on Nintendo hardware.
Learning Through Battletoads
One of Mayles’s earliest significant design projects was Battletoads, the notoriously difficult action game that became one of Rare’s best-known releases of the early 1990s. Surviving production credits place Gregg Mayles alongside Rare founders Tim and Chris Stamper under game design, making the title an important early marker in his progression from tester to professional designer.
Although Battletoads is often remembered primarily for its difficulty, particularly the infamous Turbo Tunnel, its constant mechanical variety is equally important when considering Mayles’s later work. The game rarely allowed the player to remain comfortable with a single type of challenge for very long. Traditional fighting sections could suddenly give way to racing, climbing, platforming, obstacle courses, or other sequences that required the player to reconsider what the game expected.
That willingness to change the rules before an idea had been exhausted would appear again throughout Mayles’s career. His games frequently became collections of interlocking situations rather than one mechanic repeated with increasingly difficult variations, and even when he returned to familiar characters or established properties, he generally looked for some way to alter the experience rather than simply reconstruct what had already worked.
The working environment at Rare encouraged that kind of experimentation. Teams were still comparatively small, developers worked closely across disciplines, and individual people could exert enormous influence over a project. Mayles was learning his craft in an environment where ideas could move quickly from a conversation or sketch into something that could actually be played.
A few years later, Nintendo would give Rare an opportunity that changed both the studio’s future and Mayles’s career.
Gregg Mayles and Donkey Kong Country
When Nintendo allowed Rare to develop a new Donkey Kong game for the Super Nintendo, the British studio was being entrusted with one of the most historically important characters in Nintendo’s catalog. Donkey Kong was not an obscure property waiting to be revived, but a character whose original arcade game had helped establish Nintendo in the global video game business.
Mayles became one of the central designers responsible for determining what this new Donkey Kong would actually be.
The project that became Donkey Kong Country is frequently remembered for Rare’s advanced computer-generated graphics. The studio created three-dimensional models using powerful Silicon Graphics equipment and then converted those models into sprites that could be displayed by the Super Nintendo, producing a visual style that looked strikingly different from most contemporary console games.
Yet impressive technology could not determine how Donkey Kong should move, how levels should flow, where secrets should be hidden, how animal companions should function, or what would make one stage feel meaningfully different from another. Those were design problems, and Mayles was directly involved in solving them.
Rare built the game around movement, momentum, hidden bonus rooms, animal companions, mine carts, barrels, swimming, environmental hazards, and a steady rhythm of new situations that prevented its stages from feeling interchangeable. Surviving production credits list Gregg Mayles and Tim Stamper together under game design, placing Mayles at the heart of one of the most important releases in Rare’s history.
The project also gave Mayles an opportunity to help shape a version of Donkey Kong that would endure long after the Super Nintendo era. Nintendo already owned the character, but Rare developed much of the surrounding identity that modern players would recognize, including new supporting characters, enemies, environments, and a different overall personality for the series.
Mayles preserved material from the project that later provided an unusually direct glimpse into Rare’s collaboration with Nintendo. Among the development artifacts he eventually shared publicly was a concept drawing sent by Shigeru Miyamoto suggesting that Donkey Kong wear a necktie, a simple design choice that became one of the character’s most recognizable features.
The success of Donkey Kong Country was enormous, but Mayles’s response to that success is especially revealing because Rare did not simply reproduce the same game for its sequel.
Pushing Beyond the First Donkey Kong Country
Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest appeared only a year later, yet it was not satisfied with merely offering another collection of similar jungle levels. Mayles again worked in game design, this time alongside Andrew Collard, while the team reshaped both the atmosphere and structure surrounding the original formula.
Donkey Kong became the captive rather than the protagonist, allowing Diddy Kong to move into the starring role while Dixie Kong joined him as a completely new playable character. The environments became darker and stranger, the pirate theme grew much stronger, and Rare expanded the secrets and challenges while giving the entire adventure a more distinctive atmosphere.
In later discussions of the game, Mayles emphasized the desire to improve on the original rather than simply repeat it. That instinct would become increasingly visible as his career progressed. A successful formula was not necessarily something to preserve untouched. It could instead become a foundation from which something different could be attempted.
By the middle of the 1990s, Mayles had helped Rare transform one of Nintendo’s oldest characters into the center of one of the Super Nintendo’s defining franchises. He could easily have continued working entirely within an established property.
Instead, he became deeply involved in an original project that struggled for years to discover what it wanted to be.
Its working title was Dream.
The Long Road from Dream to Banjo-Kazooie
Dream occupies a peculiar place in Gregg Mayles’s career because it became important largely through failing to become the game originally imagined.
The project began as an ambitious role-playing adventure intended for the Super Nintendo and centered on a young human protagonist named Edson. Pirates featured prominently in the concept, while the world surrounding him contained the kind of exaggerated fantasy characters that would later become familiar throughout Rare’s work.
Development eventually shifted to the Nintendo 64, but the project struggled to find a form that convinced the team it was worth continuing in its original direction. Rather than forcing the concept toward release simply because considerable work had already been invested in it, Mayles and the developers continued changing it.
Edson disappeared. Other protagonists were explored. The role-playing structure gradually gave way to something more closely resembling a three-dimensional platform game, and ideas that had once seemed fundamental became disposable if they no longer served the emerging project.
Rare later opened parts of its archive and revisited Dream publicly, with Mayles appearing alongside Ed Bryan and Paul Machacek to explain how the abandoned project evolved. Surviving footage demonstrated how far development had progressed before the team changed direction, while later Rare Revealed material helped document the connection between Dream and Banjo-Kazooie.
The transformation reveals an important quality in Mayles’s design philosophy. He was willing to abandon work, even substantial work, when it no longer seemed to be leading toward the best game. Characters, mechanics, settings, and sometimes the underlying structure of a project could all be reconsidered.
Eventually, what remained of Dream began taking a new form around a bear named Banjo.
Then came the bird in his backpack.
Designing Banjo-Kazooie
By the time Banjo-Kazooie reached the Nintendo 64 in 1998, relatively little of the original Dream concept remained recognizable, but the difficult development process had produced the game with which Gregg Mayles would become most closely associated.
Banjo was an easygoing bear, while Kazooie was a sharp-tongued bird who traveled in his backpack. Together they entered the lair of Gruntilda, a witch who had kidnapped Banjo’s sister Tooty, and explored a collection of worlds filled with Jiggies, musical notes, Jinjos, transformations, strange characters, hidden areas, and abilities that gradually expanded what the player could accomplish.
For Mayles, constructing those worlds meant learning an entirely new way of thinking about game space. While reflecting on Banjo-Kazooie for its twentieth anniversary, he remembered teaching himself to design three-dimensional environments by mentally placing himself at different locations inside a proposed level and imagining what the player would be able to see from each position.
That process was essential because the levels needed to encourage exploration without becoming confusing. Players had to feel as though they were discovering places for themselves, yet the environment still needed recognizable landmarks, logical routes, visual guidance, and enough structure to prevent freedom from becoming aimlessness.
Mayles wanted players to become absorbed in those spaces rather than treat every objective as an isolated task. Instead of constantly forcing someone to leave a level and begin another activity, Banjo-Kazooie encouraged the player to remain inside a world, notice something interesting in the distance, become distracted by another challenge along the way, and gradually understand how the level fit together.
Years later, Mayles would identify immersion as one of the strongest connections between Banjo-Kazooie and Sea of Thieves, despite the enormous technological and structural differences between the two games. In both cases, he wanted players to feel as though they had entered a place rather than merely selected another sequence of objectives from a menu.
Humor was just as important.
Mayles and the Rare team populated Banjo-Kazooie with exaggerated personalities, talking objects, absurd transformations, visual jokes, rhyming dialogue, and characters that often seemed aware of how ridiculous their world could be. The comedy was not simply decoration added after the mechanics had been completed. It influenced how characters spoke, how situations unfolded, how animations behaved, and how the player interpreted the world.
For perhaps the first time in his career, Mayles had an original universe in which his instincts about mechanics, exploration, humor, and character could all develop together without the restrictions of an established outside property.
The result became one of Rare’s defining games.
Banjo-Tooie and the Challenge of Going Bigger
Mayles returned to Banjo and Kazooie for Banjo-Tooie, released in 2000, but the sequel greatly expanded the scale of what Rare attempted.
Its environments became larger and more interconnected, abilities multiplied, transformations became more elaborate, the cast grew considerably, multiplayer was introduced, and actions performed in one location could influence events somewhere else. Rare’s later retrospective material shows Mayles and his colleagues discussing the enormous range of ideas considered during development, including the abandoned Bottles’ Revenge mode and other concepts that never reached the final game.
The sequel demonstrated both the opportunity and the danger created by success. Once a development team possesses greater technology, more experience, and a popular first game, the temptation is to expand almost everything. Worlds can become larger, mechanics more complicated, and content more abundant, but greater scale does not automatically produce a better experience.
Mayles’s career after Banjo-Tooie would increasingly involve finding different answers to that problem. Instead of simply making every succeeding project larger, he began exploring fundamentally different ways in which players could interact with games.
That experimentation continued even as Rare itself entered the largest corporate transition in its history.
Staying with Rare Through the Microsoft Years
Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, ending the company’s long period of close association with Nintendo. For Mayles, who had joined Rare thirteen years earlier and spent much of his career working on Nintendo hardware, the change introduced a new corporate owner, new consoles, and a different audience.
His first major game released during the Microsoft era was Grabbed by the Ghoulies, a comic action adventure set largely inside a haunted mansion filled with skeletons, zombies, vampires, possessed objects, and other exaggerated monsters.
The project had actually begun development for Nintendo’s GameCube before Rare was acquired, meaning Mayles and his colleagues found themselves carrying a game conceived in one environment into another. He later reflected on that transition when discussing why Grabbed by the Ghoulies struggled to connect with the Xbox audience in the same way his Nintendo-era games had with theirs.
Although the game did not achieve the commercial impact of Donkey Kong Country or Banjo-Kazooie, it retained many characteristics associated with Mayles. Humor was built directly into the action, objectives changed frequently, characters were heavily exaggerated, and the game resisted settling into a single predictable pattern for very long.
More importantly, Mayles did not respond to the reception of Ghoulies by attempting to reconstruct his greatest Nintendo successes as safely as possible.
His next major project was unlike almost anything he had designed before.
Gregg Mayles and Viva Piñata
Mayles served as lead designer on Viva Piñata, released for Xbox 360 in 2006, and the game represented one of the clearest examples of his growing interest in systems that allowed players to create their own experiences.
The basic premise was simple. The player received a neglected piece of land and gradually transformed it into a flourishing garden capable of attracting increasingly unusual species of living piñatas. Beneath the cheerful presentation, however, was a complicated network of interacting systems involving plants, terrain, food, shelter, reproduction, predators, prey, economics, and the particular requirements needed to persuade different species to visit or remain in the garden.
In a contemporary interview, Mayles described the concept as giving players an essentially empty space and then providing them with the tools necessary to turn it into something of their own.
That description reveals how much his thinking had developed since the carefully authored levels of Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie. Those games certainly allowed exploration, but the designer still determined the shape of the environment and the location of its major challenges. Viva Piñata transferred far more responsibility to the player.
One person might treat the garden as a collection challenge, while another could focus on breeding particular species, decorating the landscape, developing an efficient ecosystem, trading, or simply watching unexpected relationships emerge between the creatures living there.
Mayles resisted comparisons that reduced the game to Rare’s version of Pokémon because he believed Viva Piñata offered a broader range of motivations. Players were not simply collecting creatures according to one clearly defined objective. They were manipulating a collection of systems and deciding which goals mattered to them.
This increasing interest in giving players freedom would become enormously important later in Mayles’s career. The garden was much smaller than the ocean he would eventually help create for Sea of Thieves, but the philosophical connection was already becoming visible.
Rather than design every memorable moment himself, Mayles could create rules that allowed players to produce memorable moments through their own actions.
Why Mayles Changed Banjo Again
When Rare eventually returned to Banjo and Kazooie for the Xbox 360, many longtime fans naturally expected another three-dimensional platform adventure in the tradition of the Nintendo 64 games.
Mayles and the team considered several approaches, including concepts much closer to the original formula. One idea involved revisiting Banjo-Kazooie while gradually changing familiar events, essentially allowing the player’s memories of the original game to become part of the new experience. A location that initially appeared recognizable might suddenly behave differently, turning familiarity into surprise.
Rare ultimately abandoned that direction.
The project that became Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts instead revolved around constructing vehicles from individual components and then using those creations to solve challenges. Cars, boats, aircraft, and machines that belonged to no sensible category could all emerge from the same building system.
The decision remains one of the most controversial of Mayles’s career because a substantial portion of the Banjo audience wanted a traditional continuation of the series. Contemporary interviews show that Mayles understood those expectations but remained more interested in experimentation than in recreating a successful formula simply because it was familiar. He discussed the danger of genres becoming stagnant and defended Rare’s attempts to find new approaches.
Whether a player loved or disliked Nuts & Bolts, the decision was consistent with Mayles’s larger career. He had already moved from Battletoads to Donkey Kong Country, from Dream to Banjo-Kazooie, and from comic haunted-house action to a garden simulation populated by living piñatas.
For Mayles, preserving the identity of a character did not necessarily mean preserving exactly the same mechanics around that character forever.
Kinect Sports and Designing Without the Controller
Microsoft’s Kinect hardware presented Mayles with another challenge because it removed something he had been thinking about since his earliest days as a game tester: the conventional controller itself.
Kinect Sports asked players to interact through physical movement while a camera attempted to interpret their actions. Buttons, analog sticks, directional pads, and combinations that developers had relied upon for decades could no longer be taken for granted.
Mayles later described Kinect as one of the most demanding design challenges he encountered because so many established assumptions suddenly stopped being useful.
The challenge was particularly striking given the length of his career by that point. Mayles had begun designing during the NES era, when the controller was extraordinarily simple by modern standards, and had then watched additional buttons, analog sticks, triggers, rumble, and increasingly complicated control schemes become normal.
Kinect removed those familiar tools and forced the design process to begin again from a more basic question: if players are moving their bodies instead of pressing buttons, how should the game communicate what they need to do?
Once again, Mayles found himself in a situation where previous solutions could not simply be carried forward.
That pattern of continual adaptation would reach its greatest scale with Sea of Thieves.
Sea of Thieves and the Player as Storyteller
By the time Gregg Mayles became design director on Sea of Thieves, he had already spent more than twenty-five years at Rare. The new project, however, demanded that he reconsider the relationship between designer and player in ways that would have been almost impossible when he joined the company in 1989.
Sea of Thieves was built around a shared pirate world in which crews sailed across the same ocean, explored islands, searched for treasure, fought skeletons, navigated storms, and unexpectedly encountered other human players.
Those encounters could not be completely scripted because Rare did not control what another crew would decide to do.
A distant ship might belong to friendly players interested in cooperation, or it might contain people preparing to steal everything aboard. Two crews could form an alliance, betray one another, exchange gestures, play music together, fight over treasure, or become involved in some ridiculous accident that no developer had specifically planned.
That uncertainty was not an unfortunate side effect of the design. It was central to what Mayles and the team wanted the game to become.
In Rare’s official development material, Mayles appeared alongside executive producer Joe Neate to explain the concept and the kind of player experience the studio hoped to create. The goal was not simply to produce a sequence of pirate-themed missions, but to immerse people in a shared fantasy of sailing, fighting, exploring, drinking, cooperating, and behaving like pirates together.
Mayles remained involved in practical questions of design as well. Rare’s development videos included him discussing specific mechanics such as sword combat, demonstrating that even after moving into senior creative leadership he remained interested in the moment-to-moment interactions that had concerned him since his early career.
The game also reflected a newer reality of video game culture. Mayles and Neate discussed the importance of making Sea of Thieves enjoyable not only for the person playing, but also for people watching someone else play. Unexpected social encounters, failures, betrayals, and moments of comedy could become stories worth sharing precisely because they were not completely predetermined.
At first glance, Sea of Thieves might seem almost completely disconnected from Banjo-Kazooie. One is a late-1990s single-player platform adventure, while the other is a persistent online pirate world designed around unpredictable human interaction.
Mayles nevertheless saw connections between them.
When discussing Banjo-Kazooie in 2018, he pointed toward immersion and humor as pieces of creative DNA that remained important decades later. The technology, structure, and scale had changed, but he still wanted players to enter a convincing world, understand its basic rules, and encounter situations that could surprise or amuse them.
There was also a deeper connection between Viva Piñata and Sea of Thieves. Both depended on interconnected systems that could produce outcomes the designer did not specify in advance. In one, the player manipulated a garden filled with creatures. In the other, crews manipulated ships, weapons, treasure, weather, and one another across an entire ocean.
Mayles’s role had evolved from constructing adventures for players to creating worlds in which players could increasingly construct adventures themselves.
A Designer Who Kept Having to Learn Again
The remarkable part of Gregg Mayles’s longevity at Rare was not simply that he remained employed by the same company for more than three decades. His job kept changing because the medium around him kept changing.
When he joined Rare, small teams could build commercial console games in relatively short periods. Individual developers frequently crossed between responsibilities, and the technological limits of the hardware placed clear boundaries around what a project could become.
Mayles then experienced the move from two-dimensional games into three-dimensional environments, the rise of increasingly powerful consoles, Rare’s transition from Nintendo to Microsoft, motion-controlled gaming, online multiplayer, live-service development, and a production environment in which large teams of specialists might support the same game for years after release.
Each transformation required him to learn something new.
Donkey Kong Country required working within an established Nintendo property while exploiting new visual technology.
Banjo-Kazooie required Mayles to think spatially about three-dimensional environments and how players navigated them.
Viva Piñata required managing complicated interacting systems.
Kinect Sports forced him to think about games without conventional controller inputs.
Sea of Thieves required designing around human unpredictability and a world intended to continue evolving after launch.
Yet throughout those changes, certain instincts remained recognizable. Mayles valued mechanics, variety, humor, immersion, surprise, and the possibility that a player might approach a situation differently from the person who designed it.
Everwild and the End of Thirty-Six Years at Rare
The final major project associated with Mayles during his Rare career was Everwild, an ambitious new intellectual property publicly announced in 2019.
Its early presentations emphasized a beautiful natural world and a mysterious relationship between its inhabitants and the creatures surrounding them, but development proved difficult. The project underwent substantial internal changes, and Mayles eventually became involved in leading it during a period of restructuring.
Unlike most of the major projects associated with his career, Everwild never reached release.
Microsoft cancelled the game in 2025, and reports soon emerged that Mayles would leave Rare following the cancellation. VGC reported on his departure during the summer, and on October 14, 2025, Mayles publicly confirmed that his final day at Rare had arrived.
His farewell was remarkably restrained considering the length of the career coming to an end. Mayles thanked the people who had played the games he helped create and the colleagues who had created those games alongside him, closing a professional relationship with Rare that had begun when he was eighteen years old.
Approximately thirty-six years separated the teenage tester entering Rare in 1989 from the veteran creative director leaving in 2025.
During that span, virtually everything surrounding the work had changed.
Mayles had not.
At least, not completely.
Gregg Mayles’s Place in Video Game History
Gregg Mayles’s legacy cannot be reduced to Banjo-Kazooie, even though Banjo and Kazooie may remain the characters most closely associated with his name.
His career stretches far beyond a single series.
He helped design Battletoads while still establishing himself professionally. He became one of the key designers behind Donkey Kong Country and helped push its sequel in a more ambitious direction. He participated in the long and difficult transformation of Dream into Banjo-Kazooie, creating one of Rare’s defining original worlds in the process.
When Microsoft purchased Rare, Mayles remained.
He led the design of Viva Piñata, a game built around giving players systems and allowing them to decide what kind of experience they wanted from them. He returned to Banjo but refused to make the most obvious sequel, choosing experimentation even when that decision divided the audience. He adapted to motion control with Kinect Sports and then helped translate decades of accumulated design experience into Sea of Thieves, where the most memorable events could occur precisely because Rare had not predetermined every possible outcome.
His own professional summary reflects that extraordinary range, identifying Battletoads, Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Piñata, Kinect Sports, Sea of Thieves, and Everwild among the projects that defined his career.
There are designers with more recognizable names outside the industry, and there are creators whose careers can be attached almost completely to one masterpiece or one enduring franchise. Mayles represents something different.
His importance comes partly from continuity.
The eighteen-year-old who entered Rare’s testing department in 1989 eventually became a designer, a lead designer, a design director, and a creative leader without leaving the studio where he had learned his profession. While the industry moved through several generations of hardware and completely different assumptions about how games should be developed, distributed, played, and maintained, Mayles continued adapting his ideas to each new environment.
Millions of players encountered the results without necessarily knowing his name.
Some fought their way through Battletoads and discovered the Turbo Tunnel.
Some searched the jungles of Donkey Kong Country for hidden bonus rooms.
Some climbed Spiral Mountain before entering Gruntilda’s lair.
Some spent hours carefully arranging gardens for brightly colored piñatas.
Some built ridiculous machines for Banjo and Kazooie.
Some stood in their living rooms and attempted to play sports through Kinect.
Others raised an anchor, unfurled a sail, and crossed the ocean in Sea of Thieves without having any idea what might be waiting beyond the horizon.
The games rarely resembled one another on the surface, but that may be the clearest expression of Gregg Mayles’s career rather than a contradiction within it. He repeatedly resisted the idea that a designer should simply reproduce whatever had worked before, preferring instead to reconsider how the player could interact with a game and what kinds of experiences those interactions might create.
That willingness to experiment, to discard ideas that were not working, to risk changing successful formulas, and to keep learning as the medium changed may be the most consistent thread running through his thirty-six years at Rare.
Gregg Mayles began his career by testing other people’s games.
Before he was finished, generations of players had spent decades testing his ideas.
And in the process, he became one of the designers who most clearly helped define what a Rare game could be.
Sources & Further Reading
Mayles, Gregg. “Gregg Mayles.” D&AD. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.dandad.org/creative-community/directory/gregg-mayles
Rare Gamer. “Rare at the Herbert: Tales From Twycross Developer Panel.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/rare-at-the-herbert-tales-from-twycross-developer-panel/
Loveday, Leigh. “Banjo at 20: Gregg Mayles Interview.” Rare, June 28, 2018. Preserved by Rare Gamer. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/games/banjo-at-20-gregg-mayles-interview/
Rare. “Rare Revealed: A Rare Look at Dream.” December 22, 2015. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w72kj20YNA0
Rare. “Rare Revealed: The Making of Banjo-Tooie.” September 17, 2015. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVl0wOdB9Jc
Rare. “Rare Revealed: The Making of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.” September 14, 2015. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R2sCzlT5Uc
Rare Gamer. “The Making of Battletoads: Rare Replay Rare Revealed.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/games/the-making-of-battletoads-rare-replay-rare-revealed/
Rare Gamer. “Battletoads.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/games/battletoads/
Rare Gamer. “Donkey Kong Country.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/games/donkey-kong-country/
Rare Gamer. “The Making of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest: Retro Gamer Interviews Gregg Mayles.” Originally published in Retro Gamer, no. 181. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/games/the-making-of-donkey-kong-country-2-diddys-kong-quest/
Rare Gamer. “Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/games/donkey-kong-country-2-diddys-kong-quest/
Retro Gamer. “The Making of Donkey Kong Country.” No. 43. 2007. https://electronicsandbooks.com/edt/manual/Magazine/R/Retro%20Gamer%20UK/43.pdf
Rare Gamer. “The Making of Banjo-Kazooie: Retro Gamer Interviews Gregg Mayles & Chris Sutherland.” Originally published in Retro Gamer, no. 36. Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/games/the-making-of-banjo-kazooie-retro-gamer-interviews-gregg-mayles-chris-sutherland/
GameXplain. “Talking with Rare’s Creative Director for DKC’s 25th Anniversary.” November 16, 2019. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX3g9Z3JF9k
Video Games Chronicle. “Donkey Kong Country Team Reflects on the Game’s 25th Anniversary.” November 21, 2019. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/donkey-kong-country-team-reflects-on-the-games-25th-anniversary/
Nintendo Life. “Rare’s Gregg Mayles Shows Off the Scribbled Origins of Banjo-Kazooie.” July 2015. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/07/rares_gregg_mayles_shows_off_the_scribbled_origins_of_banjo-kazooie
Nintendo Life. “Rare’s Gregg Mayles Reveals It Was Miyamoto Who Suggested Donkey Kong Should Sport Neckwear.” September 2015. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2015/09/rares_gregg_mayles_reveals_it_was_miyamoto_who_suggested_donkey_kong_should_sport_neckwear
Game Developer. “Here’s a Look at Rare’s Unreleased SNES Pirate RPG Dream.” December 22, 2015. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/production/here-s-a-look-at-rare-s-unreleased-snes-pirate-rpg-i-dream-i-
Gambotto-Burke, Alexander. “A Rare Island of Co-operative Adventures.” The Guardian, October 11, 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/oct/12/games.guardianweeklytechnologysection1
Game Developer. “A Rare Opportunity: On Piñatas, Microsoft and More.” Accessed October 15, 2026. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/a-rare-opportunity-on-pi-atas-microsoft-and-more
Rare Gamer. “Spiral Mountain Talks to Gregg Mayles.” May 15, 2008. https://www.raregamer.co.uk/spiral-mountain-talk-to-gregg-mayles/
GamesRadar+. “Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Interview.” May 14, 2008. https://www.gamesradar.com/banjo-kazooie-nuts-bolts-interview/
Pavlacka, Adam. “‘Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts’ (X360) Developer Interview.” WorthPlaying, October 6, 2008. https://worthplaying.com/article/2008/10/6/interviews/55470-banjo-kazooie-nuts-bolts-x360-developer-interview/
Ars Technica. “Rare Responds to Peter Moore Comments.” September 25, 2008. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/09/rare-responds-to-pete-moore-comments/
Sea of Thieves. “Inn-side Story So Far.” September 7, 2016. https://www.seaofthieves.com/es-mx/news/archive/inn-side-story-so-far
Thomas, Cameron. “Behind the Scenes #1: Sword Combat.” Sea of Thieves, April 5, 2017. https://www.seaofthieves.com/news/BehindTheScenes
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