Between 1994 and 2002, there wasn’t another game studio in the world like Rare. Founded by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper and co-owned by Nintendo, the developer found a way to combine idiosyncratic British wit with the rich design sensibilities of the Super Mario creators. The result was some of the decade’s most beautiful and engrossing games. The Super Nintendo classic Donkey Kong Country, the seminal console shooter Golden Eye, the expansive 3D platformer Banjo Kazooie, the raucous Conker’s Bad Fur Day... these games combined extraordinarily detailed worlds, lush soundtracks and memorable characters. They sold in their millions. Rare was loved unconditionally.

Then things changed.

Today, barely 20 miles up the road from the Rare HQ, in an anonymous industrial estate, a small studio is looking to recreate that magic. At the moment, it’s just seven people crammed into a narrow office across the corridor from the local Tory MP. But to many many veteran gamers, these people are legends. Here is Chris Sutherland, a software engineer at Rare for 25 years, who worked on Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie and its sequel Banjo Tooie; here is Steve Mayles, the character artist who created Rare’s memorable version of Donkey Kong, as well as the charming lead protagonists of Banjo-Kazooie; here is Steve Hurst, environment art director, who drew the fantastical worlds that those games took place in.

Here too, is artist Mark Stevenson and technical director Jens Restemeier who joined Rare in 1999 to work on a series of excellent Nintendo handheld conversions. And then there is studio head is Gavin Price, who spent the nineties working his way up through Rare’s QA department, finally becoming a designer on later titles like Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and Viva Piñata.

Barely four months ago, this group got together, formed a studio named Playtonic, and started work on a new 3D platform adventure. Their aim was simple: to create a spiritual successor to the original Banjo-Kazooie vision. “It’s not a re-hash, it’s about picking up where we left off,” says Price. “With the technology we have now, we can do things faster, we can put new ideas into the genre, stuff we were dreaming about before but didn’t have the processing power to do. There’s so much more knowledge. We know we have to scale all these ideas up and go nuts with this stuff now.”

The Playtonic team: (from left): Steve Hurst, Chris Sutherland, Steve Mayles, Mark Stevenson, Andy Robinson, Jens Restemeier and Gavin Price Photograph: Keith Stuart/Guardian

Rare is still going, of course, but since 2002 it has been owned by Microsoft. There have been flashes of the old brilliance, but over the last five years the company has been tasked with finding uses for the controversial Kinect motion control hardware. Ex-employees have spoken about how the creative atmosphere at the studio has changed; it is much bigger now – more staff, more responsibility. There is less room for the old idiosyncratic wit.

“I was working on Kinect Sports and I just felt that the kind of person I am, the kind of creator I am, I was best matched to the games we were making at Rare when I started,” explains Price. “We didn’t know what was going to happen with Kinect Sports, and then Microsoft decided it was going to do a series. I thought, I’d love to find out if there’s a way to go back to making Rare-style games. I had a couple of conversations within the company, trying to find out if there was an appetite for doing anything like that. It became more clear to me that the best way forward was to get out there and make it happen. At this point a few people had already left – Jens and Steve had gone. It was just about getting back in touch with them. We also needed to find out if fans were interested...”

On 10 February, Price and his team officially announced the studio and released a piece of teaser art for its forthcoming game: two pairs of eyes hiding in the darkness of a forest setting. There was an explosion of enthusiasm from Rare fansites all over the world. The team’s twitter feed gained 20,000 followers in a matter of days; gamers started forensically studying the coy image for clues. Yes, they realised, there is interest.

What is it about Banjo-Kazooie? Released in 1998 on the N64 console, the game featured the eponymous duo – a podgy bear and his bird friend – exploring a series of fantasy worlds, solving puzzles and collecting jigsaw pieces and musical notes to unlock new areas. After the ground-breaking 3D platformer Super Mario 64, Rare’s title expanded the idea of an open, adventure-like platformer, with more detailed texture-mapped worlds and a larger array of special moves. It provided a vital transition point between the classic scrolling platformers of the 8- and 16bit eras and the PlayStation platform epics Ratchet & Clank and Jak & Daxter.

The secret that Rare harboured in those years was creative freedom. Famously situated on a farm in Twycross, along a winding path heavily protected by security cameras, the studio was a rarified factory of ideas. “It was just really easy-going,” remembers Steve Mayles. “I guess the company had made money churning out lots of NES games so it never really felt that there was much pressure – even when we did Donkey Kong Country, which was a massive deal for the company.”



Chris Sutherland takes up the theme. “On the day I started I was told I’d be working on this new piece of hardware called a Game Boy,” he says. “I was looking through the manual, which was only a few pages long, and on the second day, [Tim Stamper’s wife] Carol Stamper came over and said your first game is going to be Spider-Man. That was the only direction they gave me. Before I started at Rare I thought it would be like a laboratory with people in white coats evaluating and testing things with very detailed plans. But there was a lot of trust, it was sink or swim. It was amazing actually.”

The plan is to work in the same way with Playtonic’s first game, currently known as Project Ukulele. The team has an over-arching plan for the title and it has settled on a world concept and on two lead characters. As with Banjo-Kazooie, it’s essentially a single-player adventure, but you’ll be able to swap between the leads to take advantage of their unique skills and abilities. With most elements, though, the group are just creating stuff as they go, exploring ideas, chatting, seeing where things lead.

An exclusive piece of concept art from one of the worlds making up the Project Ukulele universe. Photograph: Playtonic

“We’ve very purposefully set up the company to feel like old Rare,” says Price. “People are in close proximity to each other, we have conversations not documents going back and forth. We chat stuff through, we bounce ideas off each other. We haven’t got this grand design document that spells out what the end product is going to look like. Nothing like that. It goes back to what Tim and Chris Stamper used to do - they just trusted everyone.

“And we don’t have to earn each others’ trust – we’ve been working with each other for so long. I didn’t have to say anything to Chris about how our character should feel – I just turned round after about a day and I looked at Chris’s screen and he’s there controlling the character, running around. Straightaway it just felt amazing.”

To facilitate this sense of freedom – this focus on design, rather than technology – Playtonic is using the Unity engine, a game creation system used by independent studios all over the world (“I was blown away by it,” enthuses Sutherland. “Things that it used to take me weeks to do, I can do in minutes”). However, there is definitely a long-term plan here. Project Ukulele is going to include a large cast of non-player characters will be used to create a Marvel-like universe of interlocking stories.

“Players won’t know who the star of our next game is, but they’ll already of met them in Project Ukulele,” says Price. “We’re going to have a massive cast and we’re purposely putting characters in there who could have their own games in the future, potentially in any genre that takes out fancy. It’ll be great to have competitive multiplayer games where the whole roster comes together. Then, if we have an idea for maybe a little 2D platformer with one character, we can just go and do it, or a fun shooter with another one. They’re all capable of meeting up in each other’s titles. I always thought we should have done more of that at Rare.”



Of course Playtonic has a cuddly Donkey Kong. Below him and just out of sight are a huge industrial sack of Yorkshire tea bags and a massive packet of Werther’s Originals – both gifts from fans.

The team is going to be at the PC gaming conference Rezzed, revealing some more details about its project. It’s clear that they’re hoping for a multi-platform release and have been talking to publishers – though they are adamant they will remain independent. Everyone wants to see this game on Wii U of course, the symbolic reunion of old Rare and old Nintendo. We’ll have to see.

For now, there’s just a fun buzz about the place. The plan is to grow the company to about 15 or 20 people to finish the game – an N64-sized dev team. Their first hire has been ex-journalist Andy Robinson in a community and marketing role. This is what British game studios used to be like in the 90s; just small groups of friends, firing ideas and jokes at each other, and allowing those things to sneak into their games. It’s just that the people in this small office once turned that approach into an artform. When Tim Stamper kicked off development on Banjo-Kazooie he told his team that he wanted players to be able to come back to this game in 20 years and still find it fresh and beautiful. They pretty much achieved his ambition. Now it’s time to do it again some place else.

“I spent 25 years at Rare and I learned a lot,” says Sutherland. “It was kind of like a 25-year boot camp on how to make games. Now I feel like I’ve graduated. I feel like I can do this now.”