‘Yooka-Laylee’ Kickstarts Retro Revival; Reaches All Stretch Goals In Under 24 Hours!

When former Rare developers reach out to the gaming community to help fund their Banjo-Kazooie inspired 3D platformer, it turns out that gamers are as passionate for the genre as the developers are.

Enter Yooka-Laylee, a project with obvious ties to the N64 days of old. Featuring team members who have worked on childhood classics such as the Donkey Kong Country series, Goldeneye 007, and of course, the two classic Banjo games, newly formed developer, Playtonic Games, have traded in the bear and bird with the bat and chameleon!

Described as a passion project that’s set to revive the “buddy duo” platformer, Playtonic is promising huge, colorful worlds with multiple abilities, near-countless collectables and a cast of characters that will charm us back to 1999, (Y2K scares not included.) Looking to design the game on a smaller budget than what Banjo cost over a decade ago, the purpose of the Kickstarter was to make sure Yooka-Laylee would be the best game possible while being able to maintain their vision.

Fans apparently agreed in a big way, with the project’s funding in 40 minutes and becoming the fastest video game to reach $1,000,000 on the crowd funding website in the process. Less than a day after launching, the campaign had met all of its stretch goals, with new goals being added to improve a game that has already captured so many. What started as a small project has exploded into something much bigger, with a potential orchestral soundtrack as the next goal while sitting on close to 1.5 million pounds, with 41 days left to donate as of this writing.

Scheduled for an October 2016 release on every major console in addition to PC, and it’s clear that Microsoft missed out on a demand that’s all too obvious. For more info, check out the Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter page here.

Sources: IGN.com, Kickstarter.com