The N64 era is back: Rare veterans on Wii U, triple-A development and its successor

Gavin Price is feeling nervous.

The creative director and studio head at Playtonic Games is about to debut his first project on Kickstarter. He and five other senior veterans from acclaimed UK developer Rare have banded together to launch a new studio which aims to take gamers back to 1996, when 3D platformers were all the rage and Rare was the jewel in the UK's games development crown.

“It’s so unpredictable,” says Price, referring to the crowd-funding platform that has made names of Oculus Rift, Broken Age and Star Citizen, but all-but-killed The Black Glove and Shadows of the Eternals.
“We have been discussing with people that have done Kickstarter before, and despite everyone saying ‘this
http://www.mcvuk.com/_media/images/2...d_original.jpg
works for us, and this didn’t’, there doesn’t seem to be any magic formulae that guarantees you anything or puts your mind at rest. So yes, massively nervous.


“We have done as much as we can do to give us the best boost possible, but it’s like the old phrase at Nintendo: ‘work hard, but in the end it's in heaven's hands.’”


The name of their game is Yooka-Laylee. It is, to all intents and purposes, the third game in the Banjo Kazooie series – which pretty much the entire Playtonic team worked on. Even the logo looks the same. Rather than a bear and bird, players this time will control a chameleon and bat duo, who must jump around 3D worlds and collect items.

"There doesn’t seem to be any magic formulae
that guarantees you anything on
Kickstarter, or puts your mind at rest."

- Gavin Price, Playtonic

It doesn’t look as if Price has anything to worry about. The game reached £100,000 of its £175,000 total in minutes. When it first announced the game with a single piece of concept art, it was enough to get the game onto the websites of pretty much every specialist games site, while it has already attracted serious attention from publishers, not to mention the likes of Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo.

“We have had some discussions with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo,” says Price. “But at this point in time, we haven’t taken it any further. We are concentrating on ourselves and the game itself, rather than the business side of things for now. I think if we can do the best we can do with the game and the Kickstarter, that will lead to even more interesting conversations.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/the-n...azooie/0148919