Gregg Mayles Leaves Rare After 36-Year Tenure

Gregg Mayles, the veteran game designer behind Banjo-Kazooie and several other Rare classics, confirmed on Tuesday that he has left the British studio after a 36-year tenure. In a short post on social media, Mayles thanked players and colleagues and closed with a brief rhyme, marking the end of a long career at the company where he helped shape many of its best-known titles.

Mayles began at Rare in the late 1980s and his first credited game, Solar Jetman, was released in 1990. Over the following decades he worked on nearly 30 projects, including Donkey Kong Country, Battletoads, Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Viva Piñata, and the Xbox-era Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Under Microsoft ownership, he served as creative director on Sea of Thieves, the studio’s most commercially prominent recent release, and also directed Kinect Sports.

His announcement follows months of upheaval across Microsoft’s gaming operations. The studio’s long-in-development title Everwild was canceled this summer, and Microsoft enacted layoffs across its game-development divisions in July. Mayles had been associated with Everwild during its troubled development, and several...