Rare: Avatar Development Started before Mii?

As a lot of people know Mii’s are pretty cool, and we have all spent tons of hours customizing and making unique ones of our friends and of various characters that we like. So it’s not surprising another company would jump on the bandwagon and try to get a little of the avatar action.

As well all know Rare is making similar avatars for Microsoft’s Xbox360. Which is all fine and good no harm was really done until Rare Artist Lee Musgrave said this one comment during one of Eurogamer’s interview.

“It was an idea that we had before Miis were a part of the gaming scene…”

Which can be taken numerous ways, especially in the way of “we weren’t copying anyone we had the idea originally”.  Hit the jump for the history of the Mii.

However, the thing that strikes me particularly odd about that comment is how could you not have known about Nintendo and Mii development. They’ve been talking about Mii’s for a while now. Especially during GDC 07 where Shigeru Miyamoto explained the development of Mii’s during a keynote speech and actually showed that the development actually started way back during the Famicom Disk System days.

Not to mention that there has been a few E3’s where characters that looked like Miyamoto, and Iwata during presentations Before the release of the Wii. Especially during the N64 Era when the idea appeared again with the Nintendo 64DD, where the player could edit a 3D character with a wide variety of clothes.

So for a Rare employee to actually say that they were actually developing the “idea” long before the Mii, may be true, but I consider it highly unlikely.

[Rare Interview here ]

An artist from New York. Will has been writing, designing, and loving video games since he was young. He has traveled across the United States, and parts of Canada in order to learn more about the world of gaming. After visiting E3 for the first time in 2009, he has vowed to return there and show off a game of his own. In his spare time he tinkers with electronics, programming, and of course collecting video games.