Banjo-Kazooie Lives on in New Kickstarted Successor

It’s a good time to be a Banjo-Kazooie fan as games new company, Playtonic Games, have successfully launched a Kickstarter for a new game, Yooka-Laylee, which is to be the spiritual successor to the popular 90’s platforming adventure game.

Playtonic Games is built up of former Rare employees, who originally created the Banjo-Kazooie series as well as games such as Viva Piñata and Conker: Live and Reloaded. With still 46 days until the Kickstarter is over, the game has raised well over double the original £175,000 ask, currently sitting at just over £370,000 at the time of writing. Should the rate of donations continue at the current rate, we could be seeing the multi-million pound next-gen Banjo that we’ve always wanted.

The game will feature an adorable duo as the protagonists, similar to the original Banjo games, except this time it’s a bright green lizard (Yooka) and a purple bat (Laylee) who you’ll get to use to explore the rich 3D environments – designed by Steven Hurst, the environment artist behind Banjo-Kazooie and Viva Piñata series. The features laid out in the Kickstarter look hugely promising, with expandable worlds, gameplay modifiers and more collectables than you can shake an N64 controller at.

It’s been a long 7 years since we’ve last seen any Banjo action, with Nuts & Bolts releasing back in 2008, but now we can hope to see the classic platformer come back to life in the very near future!