British Developer Rare was the king of nineties video games. They were on fire, achieving a ludicrous output of great games that few other developers have ever matched. They are perhaps best known for their days working on the Nintendo 64, when they came out with such classics as Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and of course, the Banjo-Kazooie games.
Then they were bought by Microsoft to work as a first party developer for the original Xbox, and everything fell apart almost immediately. Today Rare is a shell of its former self, reduced to churning out Kinect Sports games and rereleases of their old games.
Banjo-Kazooie and it’s sequel, Banjo-Tooie, are fondly remembered by many who grew up in the N64 days. Many still consider them to be some of the best 3D platformers ever made, and see the loss of the series as by far the biggest tragedy to come out of the Microsoft-Rare deal.
It turns out the developers who made the games are of a similar mind. They’d like nothing more than to release a new game in the same vein as Banjo-Kazooie, but they need your help to make it happen. A twitter account under the handle Mingy Jongo went up recently to try and gauge support for such a project, organized by a group of Ex-Rare developers, among them composer Grant Kirkhope and Steven Hurst.
The game wouldn’t be a new Banjo-Kazooie game of course, as Microsoft owns the IP. Instead it would be a spiritual successor that shares “ that same kind of humour, silly characters, fun game play, great tunes and all that stuff.” Little else is known at this point, though it seems like Unity is a likely candidate for the games engine:
“#unity will probably be perfect for our spiritual successor. I’m thinking keeping level of detail and googly eyes close to the original…”
It is believed that a Kickstarter project might go up in the near future, if the twitter campaign proves successful enough. With so much of the original staff on board, this could turn out to be kind of awesome. Disappointed by the lack of platformers in today’s Shooter-heavy age? Then head on over to their twitter page and show some support.
I’m still waiting for Nuts & Bolts 2!…
-The Theory
10/10 would rage again
Maybe they should recreate the initial Project Dream concept they had that would eventually become Banjo Kazooie. It had its own unique characters to the game I recall, so why not? All they would have to do is trim out the characters that became pivotal to Banjo Kazooie, and they’d possibly have a game that avoids a conflict for character rights.
http://www.destructoid.com/unity-partners-with-nintendo-to-bring-engine-to-wii-u-235345.phtml
Just want to put that out there.