Ex-Rare staff and one mysterious Twitter user aim to make a successor to Banjo Kazooie

Microsoft won't make another Banjo Kazooie, but some of the staff that worked on the platformer series are hoping to make a successor.

There are people out there that love bears who wear backpacks, are friends with birds, hate witches, and love jumping on things. Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, an Xbox 360 game which purported to be about those bears but was in fact some weird exercise in Lego car creation, likely disappointed those people. All they’ve had for years now are the Xbox Live remakes of the original Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie to satisfy their bear-related cravings. Not all hope is lost though. MingyJongo, an anonymous Twitter user and purportedly former Rare Inc. employee is gathering the creators responsible for those N64 games, looking to build a “spiritual successor” to the series.

“Let’s make the spiritual successor to Banjo Tooie!” reads the profile information from the MingyJongo Twitter profile opened this month. Mingy Jongo says Banjo Kazooie composer Grant Kirkhope and artist Steven Hurst will work together again on the new game. “Core members of the original team are ready to go. All we need is your support. So join us today!”

Fans still feeling the sting of Nuts and Bolts’ odd shift in style will be pleased by the group’s goals. “I’m thinking 3D platformer,” reads one Tweet, proposing a game that would be “something new” that doesn’t “try to recreate Banjo.”

“[A] game that shares the same kind of humor, silly characters, fun game play, great tunes and all that stuff that we enjoy making.”

Citing a Eurogamer article on Obsidian’s success funding Project Eternity, MingyJongo suggested that Kickstarter would be a good way to both fund the Banjo successor as well as gauge fan interest. It also said that Unity would be a good platform to build that game on. Unity would definitely make the game accessible to PC owners, but in light of Unity’s new partnership with on Wii U, it would also make it easer for this new 3D platformer to retrace Banjo’s console roots with Nintendo.

Kirkhope’s Tweets to the Mingy Jongo account suggest that the operation is credible, but as of this writing, no one knows precisely who it is maintaining the MingyJongo account. There are only a couple of potential candidates as most of the Banjo Tooie team beyond Kirkhope and Steven Hurst are still employed by Microsoft or Rare. The only potential candidates are William Bryan and Andrew Pollington who left the company after completing Kinect Sports in 2010.