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Changes to Rare's Website

by Jonathan Metts - August 13, 2002, 4:19 pm EDT
Discuss in talkback! Source: RareWhere

Hey, what happened to Donkey Kong Racing and Coconut Crackers? UPDATED: Rare responds, and so do we ...

Discuss it in Talkback!

It seems that Rare's official site (link above) has deleted links to both Donkey Kong Racing and DK Coconut Crackers from its "Forthcoming Projects" page. No explanation from the company is given, but it's worth noting that Diddy Kong Pilot is still listed.

Thanks to the many readers who spotted this and alerted us.

UPDATE: Rare's Andy Wilson has told the following to Computer and VideoGames ...

Rare itself earlier poured cold water on the rumors insisting that all is well. Production assistant Andy Wilson told us: "It's simply due to updating the site," a mere technical issue rather than some grand act of obfuscation. Wilson went on to confirm that both games were still very much in production.

Sorry, Rare. We're not buying it. We checked the underlying HTML source code for the site, and it turns out that they're using large image "maps" for the page links. With normal links, it's possible, and even common for a coding error to accidentally drop a link.

The problem here is that in order to change the links in an image map, you have to change the entire graphic, as well as the underlying code. Graphics can't be changed on accident.

To Rare's credit, the formerly linked pages are still on the website. But the links were not REMOVED accidentally, it's just not possible. Someone had to make a new graphic, so it must have been done deliberately. Also ... since they now know about the problem, wouldn't they have fixed it? As of this writing, the page still has the games missing. In fact, the hidden link we wrote about before is now gone, proving that they did indeed check the page and make changes after our initial story.

More on this as it develops.

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