Kickstarter seems to be the place to go if you want to breathe new life into dead video game genres, and games like Star Citizen have already proven that niche markets can still pay off in a big way. Now, the creators of colorful platformer Yooka-Laylee are aiming to do the same thing for the “buddy-duo platformer,” a genre that the team basically invented themselves with 1998’s Banjo-Kazooie.

Within the first 40 minutes of its Kickstarter campaign going live, Yooka-Laylee smashed its funding goal, and the number continues going up. The game has already raised triple its original funding goal, and it is sitting at over $800,000 in contributions from nearly 14,000 backers. The campaign still has 46 days left, which is plenty of time to reach its maximum stretch goal of £1,000,000 (about 1.5 million USD).

“Bleeding Norah, the Yooka-Laylee Kickstarter was only live for 40 minutes before you went and funded it!” the developer wrote in an update. “Crowdfunding will help us increase the scope of Yooka-Laylee, and if we do even better we’ll be able to deliver some real dream features like a fully orchestrated soundtrack and simultaneous, physical release on all platforms.”

The Rareware legacy

Yooka-Laylee stars an animal duo – one of whom is a wisecracking flyer – who team up to us their wacky abilities to navigate a colorful world as they collect items, fight bad guys, and unlock new zones. If that formula sounds familiar, it is because the game is designed to be the spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, a cartoony platformer from the golden age of the Nintendo 64 console.

Yooka-Laylee’s developer, Playtonic Games, is made up of some of the same team members who created Banjo-Kazooie when they were still part of Rareware, which is now the Microsoft Corp-owned Rare Ltd. The Banjo-Kazooie veterans include character artist Steve Mayles, lead programmer (and voice of both Banjo and Kazooie) Chris Sutherland, composer Grant Kirkhope, and environment artist Steven Hurst.

The game’s Kickstarter page makes it clear that the developers are banking heavily on players’ sense of nostalgia and love for Banjo-Kazooie, and after raising nearly $1 million in just a few hours, it looks like they might be right.

Image credit: Playtonic Games