Last year, Microsoft renewed their trademark on Rare's Battletoads IP, the notoriously hard NES game. This coincided with Xbox lead Phil Spencer taking a visit to the studio to see a new title that felt 'distinctly Rare'. When people put two and two together, they came to the conclusion that this game must have been a new Battletoads. I personally think the two events are coincidental, but the prospect of a new Battletoads is at least an interesting one to think about.

Well, Microsoft's Ken Lobb has given some good and bad news this week. Let's do the good news first. On the Inner Circe Podcast (via Dual Shockers) Lobb talked surprisingly openly about the IP saying that a game will be coming in the future.

So will there ever be another Banjo, Viva, Blast Corps, Battletoads? Yeah, Some Day. And I think the reason you see things like Battletoads revived is because we know there's value, so we renewed the trademark.

The bad news? It likely won't be this year. He continued saying:

Does that mean it's coming this year? No. Does that mean it'll never come? Absolutely not. We have a lot of passion internally for each of these games that you mentioned and we have surprises in store in the near and long future, but undersatand that what it's really about is, we want to build this suite of IP that we can add to that list of "Let's build some new things," "let's build some recent sequels," and "let's do some crazy stuff" like dig back into a portfolio of IP and build some games that people love.

I think this is the closest indication yet that Rare's new game will be a new IP. As pointed out by the developer's composer this week, Rare is set for a "huge year". I'd put some money on them turning up during Microsoft's keynote at E3.