One of the best surprises from the successful Xbox Game Showcase was the announcement that Toys for Bob have been working on a brand new Spyro the Dragon game titled Spyro: A Realm Beyond. Lou Studdert, associate creative director on Spyro: A Realm Beyond, and Paul Yan, studio head at Toys for Bob have recently taken part in an informative interview. Yan explained they went to Xbox explained that the Spyro Reignited Trilogy had shifted 11 million units, said that there’s definitely an audience there for a new entry, and the team at Xbox agreed with them and the rest is history. Here’s what the duo had to say:
“Honestly, Spyro has kind of a deep place in our studio’s heart,” Studdert explains, referencing work on the Skylanders franchise, as well as the Spyro Reignited Trilogy. He adds, “We’ve always admired that kind of small but mighty underdog story of the character that’s taking on these overwhelming odds, you know, we see ourselves in that a little bit, and honestly, it just was a no-brainer.”
Studdert adds that “since we made Reignited, we have had the hope to take him further,” and that “we always wanted to return to the world of Spyro, to bring that character forward, and so time was right, and we left it to chance.”
Yan: “Going independent was taking on massive, massive risk, right? It’s taking a bet on ourselves,” he says, adding: “We knew coming out of Reignited – that title sold over 11 million copies, so there’s an audience that woke up to show up for that series.”
“Every year, every gaming event we hear the fanbase show up, like, ‘when is there going to be a new Spyro title?’ even before we had even pitched this,” Yan explains. This in turn helped the studio in pitching the new title. “When we came up to Xbox and said, listen, here’s our plan, we said, ‘look, there’s a community, it’s loud and consistent, they know what they want, you’re here to make this game, what else do you need, let’s get this thing going.”
Yan adds, “I’ll say that we love Spyro, love Banjo, love all these types of titles,” while shouting out the recent resurgence of platformer icons through Rayman Legends Retold and Astro Bot. “We’ve been doing this all along. It’s not a new thing that we’re shifting to, but we want to carry that type of experience into the world.” He explains: “We think that the world needs these types of experiences, and we want to make them.”
