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.”
Took a long time….that was last gen and this end of this gen
People wanted Spyro back that’s why. Should TFB make it no. They make ugly garbage like the remake and Crash 4. Vicarious should have remade Spyro and then continued Spyro and Crash not these people. Bob Rafei should have been brought on.
(suggestion: always be polite and considerate (one more suggestion: this Biblical verse: “Don’t use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them.” – Ephesians 4:29, New Living Translation version))
Crash 4 sold over five Million Copies. It out sold Donkey Kong Bananza l’s recorded Sales, and it out sold Metroid and many more.
crash 4 is multiplat lol that makes it worse in comparison but its still good overall in terms of profit for the company.
dk sold 4.54m alone on switch 2.
The issue is because Activision for whatever reason made the flaw of releasing the switched version of crash 4 nearly a year after the other ones were released. Considering that the crash in sange trilogy sold the most by a mile on switch, it’s basically baffling that they skip to the first year of the platform that would have received that game the best. It would be like if they announced Call of Duty Modern Warfare for switch two only and then release it on PlayStation 5 and PC a year later. Absolute numb skull decisions led to those disappointing sales.
Sounds like pretty good numbers to me considering how many times Crash and Spyro have been sold off and swapped between companies and almost bankrupting some of said companies. The Reignited and Insane Trilogies were Great. Crash Racing would have been great but Activision forced the game to be full price and have over $1500 in microtransactions for things that should have not been. Crash 4 was great. I don’t know why they changed the character designs but the redesigns weren’t that bad, they weren’t needed but weren’t bad as they could have been. They seem to have kept faithful to Spyro, maybe a Crash 5 will use the OG design. Toys for Bob are great though I think. I like and have enjoyed their work. They’ve done a lot of good for Crash and Spyro. If they ever do Banjo I’m down if brought to Nintendo. (The Original Rare is gone, many now work at Playtonic Games.)