The sad news was announced through the British studio’s official Twitter account today. Winds from Storm Ciera have been reported being as high as 97mph, which has caused widespread flooding as well as some major disruption to transportation. Thankfully, the studio itself was unharmed, and none of Rare’s employees were hurt.
Rare’s most iconic game, Banjo-Kazooie, released in 1998, becoming an instant classic, and is still considered one of the best platformers of all time. Banjo and Kazooie were recently released as DLC characters in Super Smash Brothers, which introduced a whole new generation of gamers to the widely-beloved characters.
Rare has been around since the mid-1980s. It’s mostly known for a number of popular games from the N64 era, including Conkers Bad Fur Day, GoldenEye, and Donkey Kong Country. However, it’s continued making games into the modern era. In 2018 the studio released Sea of Thieves, a multiplayer action-adventure game, while Sea of Thieves got off to a rocky start, it’s now considered quite good by a large portion of its community.
This is an exciting time for Rare studios. At X019 it announced Everwild, a new IP it’s working on. While details are scant, it appears to be some sort of open-world game. It does not appear that the storm has effected progress on the game, or delayed it in any way.
For long time fans of the Banjo-Kazooie series, the loss of the Kazooie statue may come as devastating news– almost as devastating as the lack of a third game in the Banjo series– but there is a silver lining. In a follow-up tweet, Rare confirmed that a Banjo statute also located at the studio was unharmed by the storm. Rare also confirmed through twitter that the Kazooie statue is being fixed and will soon be back to “eyeing everyone sassily as they drive into the car park.”
Banjo-Kazooie is available for N64 and Xbox.
MORE: Is a Next-Gen Banjo-Kazooie Coming From the Original Devs?
