In what’s been a very expensive game of ‘pass the parcel’, UK development studio Rare is the big winner. Having bought back 49 percent of their shares from a no-longer-interested Nintendo, Rare has sold the entire company to Microsoft for $375 million.

Rare founders, Tim and Chris Stamper, and the rest of the Warwickshire-based team will continue to work at the Rare studio. Reports of whether some of the company’s staff had gone out for a celebratory curry are unconfirmed, but thought unlikely. Time constraints have been a well documented problem at the firm for some years.

To celebrate this new era in videogaming, the Stamper Brothers exchanged shirts with Ed Freis at X02 in bizarre scenes reminiscent of Manchester United’s Signing of Veron…

Rest assured, we’ll be monitoring closely what goes on between Microsoft and Rare. The developer’s undoubted talents surely mean that the Xbox is due for some very high quality games in the future.