Playtonic Games is paying homage to the past as the game developer introduces a new, retro-inspired character in "Yooka-Laylee."
The new character, dubbed as Rextro Sixtyfourus, is a dinosaur that seems to be taken straight out of a '90s 3D video game because of its blocky, highly pixelated body. He will serve as the guardian of all the arcade machines that are tuck hidden in each level of the game, where exciting old-school gaming experience and retro challenges can be completed to allow players to receive another Pagie.
In an exclusive report from IGN, character designer Mark Stevenson revealed that Rextro was supposed to be introduced when the game was still having its Kickstarter campaign, but they decided to launch the game's crowdfunding campaign without him in the lineup.
Stevenson shared that he got the inspiration for Rextro's appearance from the past characters that he created for the Donkey Kong 64 game. He also shared that he chose to include a dinosaur character in the upcoming action-adventure platform game as a homage to the past video games that he created.
"I wanted Rex to to feel like he captured the era of games from my early career which also included work on the Donkey Kong games on the Super Nintendo," the character designer explained. "Finally just to reinforce the retro aspect some more, I created a custom shader that creates a scanline effect on Rextro to make him look like he's being viewed on an old school CRT TV."
Meanwhile, a separate exclusive report from IGN revealed that soundtrack composer Grant Kirkhope shared a teaser of the upcoming game's soundtrack. Kirkhope was also the one who created the sounds for the beloved Nintendo 64 game "Banjo-Kazooie" from Rare. Since most of the developers from Playtonic Games came from Rare, "Yooka-Laylee" is considered as the spiritual successor of "Banjo-Kazooie."
"Yooka-Laylee" is expected to come out on PlayStation 4, Wii U, Xbox One, and PC editions in October 2016.
