The Making of Kinect Sports – Celebrating 15 Years with Xbox Feature

After Nuts & Bolts, Rare was busy working away on numerous projects – many of which never came out.

But some of those prototypes led to a new chapter in its history, and one that started when the team designed the Avatar characters for Xbox Live.

At the same time as the Avatars, Rare was experimenting with Newton – Microsoft’s unreleased answer to the Wii Remote.
They had created a traditional dance and sports prototype, among others, before Microsoft shelved the project for something original.

“I was in Seattle one time, and I got dragged away to meet a guy called Alex Kipman, who we now know for HoloLens,” continues Schuneman.
“Microsoft had decided to kill this Newton controller, because it was too similar to the Wii, and Alex had been working on inventing this new thing called Kinect. I got to meet him and the decision was made for us to double down on Kinect. So we started to merge the studio into one mega team and build Kinect Sports.”

Rare was now a Kinect-devoted studio, and its first project would go on to be its biggest Microsoft hit-to-date.
2010’s Kinect Sports was in essence a sports compilation that in part served to introduce new Kinect owners to the device, with the Xbox Avatars as its central stars.
A sequel followed in 2011, and when the Xbox One introduced Kinect 2.0, Rare again stepped up to the plate with Kinect Sports Rivals.

Before all that, however, Rare had to come to grips with what the hardware could (and couldn’t) do.

“We’ve had a lot of prototype and pre-production hardware over the years. We have worked on console launches,” reveals Machacek, before detailing Rare’s first experience with Kinect. “It was interesting pulling the sensor out of the box. It didn’t come with many instructions; there were a few demos, to show what the various cameras were seeing on the screen, and how the basic skeletal tracking was working. We then couldn’t get it working reliably enough to do anything with it. After much to-ing and fro-ing, we realised it didn’t like daylight, so we got loads of tin foil and covered the windows, turning the rooms into dark caves for many months until a new version arrived.”

Mayles adds: “It was equal parts frustrating and rewarding. It certainly was a battle to get what we got out of it. But when we’re up against it or there’s a technological challenge, I think that’s when we do our best work.”

“With Kinect, human beings do things very different from each other. If you ask a player to swing their arm, or throw a ball, they will do it in an almost infinite amount of ways. And they’ll always expect it to be right, and the sensor needs to be able to pick up all those different ways. So if it’s an under arm throw, or overarm, or from the side… loads of weird throws, and our battle was to ensure that no matter how they did it, it was still right.

“We got to predicting what players were trying to do. We designed it in such a way that it didn’t require very specific inputs. It was a challenge, but I enjoyed it. With Kinect, you had to almost forget everything you thought you knew about game design. Up until that point, everything had been on a controller for us. We had to throw that away and design with a very different controller, which was the human body.”

Macachek again: “We also had to do a massive amount of user research around the world. There were geopolitical things we had to overcome, particularly with the Champion feature when we did Kinect Sports Rivals. We were scanning people then trying to create a character that was based on them. We had to get that right.”
As a result, Rare became something of a leading authority on working with Kinect, even going on to support other internal teams on using the hardware.