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Kev Bayliss joins the Playtonic Games Team
News reported by 
(Editor)
January 11, 2016, 19:49
 
In a Kickstarter-backer e-mail sent earlier today, it was announced that Kev Bayliss has joined the team officially and more distinctly over at Playtonic Games. Playtonic Games is comprised of a significant amount of ex-Rare employees. Their current efforts are to produce their first title, Yooka-Laylee, which is a pseduo-sequel to the spirit that can be found in the Banjo-Kazooie games for the N64. He might also be recognizable as one of the key artists on the Donkey Kong Country series.

Kev Bayliss made his official announcement with the following letter.

Kev Blayliss said:
After working at Rare for nearly 20 years (since the 80s!) it was nice to be able to take a break from games when I eventually left in 2005. I’ve worked on a few music and art projects since then, but I also missed being part of a video game team.

The timing with Playtonic was perfect. After meeting up with the team last year it became obvious to me that this was something I had to be a part of. I hadn’t seen some of the Playtonic team for almost a decade, but the environment and dynamic they’d recreated at the studio felt as though I’d been transported back to the 90s – in a good way!

For the past six months I've been travelling up and down the country to spend a couple of days a week with the team, but now I’m in the process of re-locating to work fulltime at Playtonic. This year my wife and I are moving much nearer to where the studio is located, and it'll take me 15 minutes to get into work, rather than two hours. So that means more graphics, and speedier development time!

To date I’ve really enjoyed contributing characters to Yooka-Laylee and working within the office environment. So far I've built a variety of silly characters for the game, from concept sketch right through to the final models and animation. I had to spend a bit of time getting back up to scratch with technology, but thankfully a few months of nagging the other artists sorted that!

In the future I’d love to rekindle some of the ideas I've had since leaving Rare, and help bring to life some of those even bigger, bolder character concepts that have been brewing in my head. I've so many ideas, old and new, so it's going to be great fun filling that little logo-flask with more stars.

In short, it's like old times, but new! There are fantastic group of people here and we all have the same ambitions. I'm very pleased and feel very lucky to be connected to the company now, and really excited about the future!


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01/11/16, 19:49   Edited:  01/11/16, 19:49
 
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Are we essentially getting Rare back? That'd be awesome.

I hope this game turns out well.

Posted by 
 on: 01/11/16, 20:03
Yeah, saw this email earlier, too. Nice!

I'm not sure if this necessarily means we're getting RARE back. A lot of what made them so good in the '90s was their involvement with Nintendo, no? At least, particularly with the genre Yooka-Laylee is in?

Or was RARE more "on their own" than I thought?

Posted by 
 on: 01/11/16, 20:08
@GameDadGrant Well, I meant the key members. To get the exact quality level back might take more than just having the team members, but I guess we'll see what they come up with here.

With that said, obviously Playtonic doesn't have all of the key members of Nintendo-era Rare, so I wasn't really being literal.

Posted by 
 on: 01/11/16, 20:41
When I first backed this game I was doing it for selfish reasons, I wanted a new Banjo. Now I feel like we've let this team become what it used to be and that makes me feel even better about it all.

Posted by 
 on: 01/11/16, 21:08
@Abdooooo

Yeah. I'm really happy for him and the rest of the Playtonic Team. Working together on Yooka-Laylee must be really exciting and nostalgic for everyone involved. I'm sure it'll be an amazing game!

Posted by 
 on: 01/11/16, 21:26
Sweet! The more former glory days Rare talent that joins this team, the better.

I really hope we see some new footage from this game pretty soon. I would like to see how it's coming along.

Posted by 
 on: 01/11/16, 23:47
What did he do at Rare?

Nvm.

Posted by 
 on: 01/12/16, 02:56   Edited:  01/12/16, 03:17
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