Mark Betteridge, studio manager for Rare, has said if the team did decide to make a new Killer Instinct then it would have to be revolutionised, not just a rehash.
Rare didn’t just want to ”build a Banjo game that was hi-def” and based on old gameplay experience, the same will apply to Killer Instinct but they won’t ”chase a genre”.
If they do make a new Killer Instinct then they want to build their ”own area” in the genre, not just apply what everyone expects to be included nowadays.
”Killer Instinct is an IP that is fondly remembered and we may do something with it, but it’s a tricky market to be like the old Killer Instinct,” explained Betteridge, speaking to Eurogamer.
”At the time there was Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat and we were thinking, ‘how do we make our own area here?’ and it came from the combo system. The market after that became more and more specialised.”
Despite the shrinking of the user base for the fighting genre he insists there’s still many great opportunities just waiting to be plucked. MK and SF are resurging themselves.
”Once a market gets like that then it needs a revolution to bring something new to it and to kick-start a new growth,” he said. ”It will stagnate for a while and then it needs a real significant change of direction potentially.”
”It is a law of diminishing returns to recycle the same game. That’s why we didn’t want to do that with Banjo just to build a Banjo game that was hi-def. We wanted to do a game that not only provided a different gameplay experience that we couldn’t do before, but we wanted to build something that we can then build on to do other titles.”
”The best way to have success is to build your own area,” added Betteridge. ”We don’t want to chase a genre. We think the best genres are the ones that don’t exist at the moment.”