Playtonic made the announcement on the company’s official website, along with a message for backers:
A game going gold only 21 months after its Kickstarter campaign began is a pretty big deal, considering crowd funded games can often fall into development hell, causing significant delays. Granted, Yooka-Laylee had one delay that pushed its release date from 2016 to the following year, but the trailer that accompanied it tugged at all the right nostalgic threads and all seemed to be forgiven by the masses.
Currently, the campaign is asking backers for their final choices on which platform they’d like to play the game. The Wii U was removed as an option after Nintendo ended the console’s production. Playtonic announced on the Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter page that it will continue to “work closely” with Nintendo to attempt to bring the game to the Switch.
Often referred to as the spiritual successor to the beloved Banjo-Kazooie, a series that also had a fondness for musical puns and hyphens, Yooka-Laylee was a bit of a success story already. The game’s Kickstarter campaign met its finance goal in under an hour after it began, which likely boosted the confidence of the development team that hoped to make the game bigger than Banjo-Kazooie.
There were apparently enough fans clamoring for a followup that they were willing to fund the game. Also, the fact that Playtonic Studios is made up of former Rare employees, the studio behind Banjo-Kazooie, probably didn’t hurt.
Now that the game has gone gold, all fans have to do is hold out for a couple more months until they can once again partake in a genre of gaming thought nearly extinct. We here at Game Rant have certainly been hoping that platforming makes a strong return, and Yooka-Laylee could be the game that leads the genre back into popularity.
Yooka-Laylee will release for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on April 11, 2017.
