Rare Platformer Nostalg-o-Kickstarter: Yooka-Laylee
Spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie
You may have thought we'd run out of nostalgia to mine for Kickstarter but good gravy no! A group of folks formerly of Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country developers Rare, now at their own studio Playtonic Games, launched a crowdfunding campaign for a ye olde 3D N64-stylee platformer on Friday and have already blown past their goal.
They were looking for £175,000 to make Yooka-Laylee [official site], billing it as a "spiritual successor" to Banjo-Kazooie. With 42 days still to go they already have over £1.3 million in pledges. Lawks!
Yooka-Laylee sees the eponymous chameleon and bat friends romping around, jumping and gliding and knocking enemies over and collecting things and riding mine carts and, you know, N64 platformer stuff. It's a genre I don't miss at all myself, but clearly plenty of folks miss it dearly, so who am I to be a curmudgeon?
Playtonic plan to release Yooka-Laylee for Windows, Mac, and Linux by October 2016. Pledging at least £10 will get you a download copy of the game, though given how well funding's going and that they've already crushed almost every stretch goal, you may consider letting others foot the risk and waiting to see if the game's any good.
If you want more of Rare's Conker, er, well, an episodic Conker series is coming to Project Spark. Yeah, that probably won't be quite the same.