No Banjo Kazooie at E3? No Viva Pinata? Blame Project Natal.

We've been looking for Rare at E3. Microsoft's Shane Kim, corporate v. p. at Microsoft for Xbox 360 strategy and business development, didn't exactly tell us where they are, but he did tell us what they're up to.

"Rare is intimately involved with Project Natal in a number of different dimensions," Kim said, referring to Microsoft's controller-free game control set-up that's been the buzz of E3. "They're doing an awful lot of work, even outside the traditional game space, I would say. Unfortunately I can't go into a lot of detail about that. Rare is alive and well and really having a broader impact on the entire Xbox world than just doing the games they traditionally have in the past."

Rare's most recent publicly shown projects were last year's Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts and Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise. Rare also created the Avatar system launched last last year across all Xbox 360s.

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