Yooka-Laylee, the game from the creative team behind Banjo-Kazooie has found a publisher.
Developers Platonic have partnered with Team17, publisher of The Escapists and developers of the Worms series. The deal will allow Playtonic to build on its hugely successful Kickstarter campaign which raised a whopping £2m in May.
Gavin Price, creative lead at Playtonic commented, “From the very start we said that we’d welcome only a partner that could genuinely improve the creation of our game, while respecting the independence and creative autonomy of our development team. Team17’s 25-year industry-leading expertise will significantly benefit Yooka-Laylee in a myriad of ways, not least in expanded localisation, improved QA testing, certification and access to vastly better resources for our team. Working alongside such a strong partner will allow the Playtonic team to focus 100% of our efforts on building the best possible version of Yooka-Laylee for backers and new fans alike.”
Debbie Bestwick, Team17’s managing director is excited too, “We have deep respect for the team at Playtonic. They have a very rich heritage and have worked on titles close to the heart of a lot of our team here. We’ve been following their Kickstarter campaign with interest and are delighted to welcome them onto our label and into the Team17 family.”
Yooka-Laylee features new heroes Yooka and Laylee and is very much a spiritual successor to Rare’s dormant Banjo-Kazooie franchise. The game project will feature environments and characters created by the artists from that series, and will also feature a soundtrack created in collaboration with highly-regarded game composers David Wise, Steve Burke and Grant Kirkhope .
Yooka-Laylee is due release in October 2016 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, PC, Linux and Mac platforms.
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