Former Rare Team Unveils Spiritual Successor to Banjo Kazooie

The former members of Rare at Playtonic Games have given us a first look at what is going into its spiritual successor to Banjo Kazooie, Project Ukulele.

Eurogamer reports that Playtonic Games is opening a Kickstarter campaign for Project Ukulele. Playtonic has also revealed two in-engine screenshots of Ukulele during a panel at EGX Rezzed this past weekend. Gavin Price spoke a lot about the project during the panel (featured in the video above, courtesy of EGXTV), revealing all sorts of juicy details about the project. Price said to expect lots of jibberish dialogue, googly eyes, silly comedy and many of the same fun-loving ideas that we adored with Banjo back on the N64. The team mentioned that the success of the Kickstarter will coordinate with fan feedback to see what kind of stretch goals the project will have. Throughout the panel, the Playtonic team mentioned the possibility of amiibo figures for Project Ukulele, which suggests they're being hopeful for at least a Wii U release (the provided screenshots of Ukulele are a bit too high in resolution for a 3DS title, but nothing is confirmed of course).

"We honestly weren't expecting as big a reaction as we got. We've had tons and tons of emails — a massive fan response. But it's good — we want that pressure, we're really happy with that reception," said Gavin Price. "Up until a few weeks ago [Kickstarter] wasn't really on our radar, but since we've had such a massive response from people - we're thinking that the game has to become a lot bigger, a lot broader, we want to do a lot more with it now to make people happy."

While the game is currently under the code name Project Ukulele, there is no finalized title for the game yet. Based on a previous promotional picture for the game, Ukulele will star a duo of characters who will work in close coordination with each other, with one character appearing to be staying on the back of another, so some kind of compound name of Ukulele's two main characters will likely add up to the game's official name, just as before.

Price told fans to keep an eye on Playtonic's social media sites to see how its determining Ukulele's stretch goals for its upcoming May Kickstarter campaign.