Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter Raises Over $2 Million

Nintendo is a company known for making high quality games and dominating the video game industry since the dawn of console gam­ing. In fact Nintendo is so well known you could probably ask any person living in a first world country who Mario is and they’d point you right to the company. Now, why bother mentioning Nintendo, well as you may have seen in the title a really interesting Kickstart­er known as Yooka-Laylee came to light in the gaming community recently. Why? Because within 40 minutes this campaign reached its goal of $175,000. It has now broken $2 million in donations since May 10.

Why is this so amazing? Well, let me ex­plain all the excitement about the Yooka-Lay­lee project. This all goes back to when the Nintendo 64 was still a very new console (it was released September 29, 1996). The Nin­tendo 64 had become so popular among peo­ple at the time that it went from a luxury to a must have, selling 350,000 to 500,000 consoles within the first three days of being on the market. Time Magazine even said that “You have people fighting to get it from stores.” About two years after the console came out, the game Banjo-Kazooie was released for the console on June 29, 1998 by Rareware.

Rareware had also made a few other very notable games for the system such as Golden­Eye 007, Perfect Dark, and many others. To say the least, they took the market by storm; they were the top dogs of video game develop­ment for the 64-bit console era.

Now why tell you all of this? For one sim­ple reason, Rareware is back, though now under the name Playtonic Games. Rareware is actually still in business, but all the old great minds behind Banjo-Kazooie, which sold an estimated 3.65 million copies according to vgchartz.com, are now on the Playtonic Game team. Playtonic means to take the essence of what Rareware used to be known for and bring the platforming genre back into the eyes and hearts of the public with new characters. The two characters are Yooka, the “green bloke with no pants” as the Kickstarter says, or the Chameleon. Then Laylee, “the wisecracking lady bat with the big nose” as stated on the Kickstarter.

With Kickstarter they have raised a lot of extra money and with that have brought more to the game including a fully orchestrated soundtrack made by David Wise, Grant Kirk­hope, and Steve Burke. They only got the best of the best for making a game that is set to take the industry once again by storm. The last goal which is set at a huge, yet reachable goal of two million pounds ($3,137,110 US) will give the game a DLC (downloadable con­tent) that will be completely free to people who backed the Kickstarter campaign.

The Kickstarter has until June 16, which is plenty of time considering the exponential growth the project has had. If you donate at least $15 to the project, you will receive a copy of the game on either PC via Steam Network, Wii U, Xbox One, or Playstation 4. For me, this is a huge burst of nostalgia and excitement, and if you believe in the project, feel free to donate as over 40,000 other have. Remember that this game is not complete yet and is esti­mated to be released next October in 2016, so there will be a wait for the game. So if you want to see it support the project, if not feel free not to, as you can always buy it later when it is released.

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