Yooka-Laylee

About

Yooka-Laylee is an upcoming platformer video game in development by the studio Playtonic Games. The project, run by former developers of the Banjo-Kazooie series, became the fastest video game to reach $1 million in pledges on Kickstarter in May 2015.

History

In 1998, the video game development company Rare released the game Banjo-Kazooie for the Nintendo 64.^[1] Several sequels for the game were subsequently released until 2008, when the final game Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts was released for the Xbox 360. In February 2015, several former Rare employees formed the video game studio PlaytonicGames and announced plans to develop a “spiritual successor” to Banjo-Kazooie. On February 16th, the @PlaytonicGames Twitter feed replied to YouTuber Jon Jafari that he would be voicing a character in the upcoming game (shown below).

On April 30th, Rare announced that the game would be titled Yooka-Laylee. On the following day, a Kickstarter^[3] campaign for the game was launched, which accumulated upwards of £1 million in funds in the first 24 hours, becoming the fastest video game in Kickstarter history to pass US$1 million. The game has an expected release date of October 2016.

Online Presence

The same day the game was announced, the /r/YookaLaylee^[5] subreddit was launched for discussions about the game. Also on April 30th, 2015, YouTuber GameXplain uploaded a video containing commentary about the game’s characters and gameplay (shown below).