Bob On Flight, Tom Kenny, and Coming Home toys

I was particular about my Spyro. Ripto’s Rage! – or Gateway to Glimmer, depending on which side of the pond you grew up on – was the game I played until the cartridge had a groove worn into it. The Year of the Dragon got more playing time. The real game came much later for me, and somewhere I played almost everything else that the franchise had to offer, except for Spyro Orange and Season of Ice, because some things are better left untouched. So when Bob’s Toys showed up at Summer Game Fest and confirmed Spyro: The Realm Beyond, the first new mainline entry in nearly two decades, I didn’t want to know. I needed to know if this was going to be done right.

I sat down with the team behind it after the show, and what came out of that conversation was less than a direct Q&A with the studio explaining, in real time, why it took them so long to get back to the character that made them who they are.

A Long Ten-Year Journey Calling Work

YouTube by MrFalliorGaming

Bob’s road toys to A Realm Beyond didn’t start with Spyro at all. It started with the Reignited Trilogy, lovingly rebuilt versions of the original three games, then Crash Bandicoot 4 and Crash Team Rumble. Then COVID happened, and Activision Blizzard needed its core teams to support big machines. Bob’s Toys, a team of about 50 people, found themselves separated to support Warzone and Overwatch 2 for a few years.

It wasn’t a wasted stretch, really. The studio went from there to working on new genres, new tools, and teams we hadn’t worked with before. But it also wasn’t what they signed up to do in the games. “We felt like we were too far away from the kinds of games we like to make and are known for,” the band told me, and you could feel how long they’d been sitting with them.

Then Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard began its long, drawn-out journey through regulators, and Bob’s Toys used that uncertainty as a window. The idea they brought to the leadership, by their own admission, was unprecedented: restore their independence, manage their own creative process, and at the same time, ask Xbox to support the new Spyro game. No one had tried this exact move before. They wanted it anyway, and now we have the result.

Team Build a Name Cloud on Your Followers’ Actions

YouTube by TheMoonRover

When Bob’s Toys first found out what flying like Spyro must really feel like, they didn’t just sit around and discuss it internally. They went through YouTube comments, TikTok clips, Reddit threads, every corner of the fandom they could find, and pulled out the names that kept repeating. Calm down. Happy. The momentum. Friendship. That became their compass.

A slightly funny picture, a team of developers creating a virtual word cloud from your tweets and comments to decide if a new flight mechanic finds its place in the game. But it also tells you a lot about how seriously they take the gap between what longtime fans remember and what they build. The actual flight in the Spyro games was limited: gliding, baby wings, a few fast track levels with a timer. Realm Beyond will ditch that entirely in favor of full-on, continuous dragon flight.

Tom Kenny Is Back, And He’s Never Really Left

If there’s one piece of news here that needs no further context, it’s this: Tom Kenny is voicing Spyro again. Not an audible sound, not a repetition, a real real voice. According to the group, he walked into the booth already knowing his old names by heart, no script needed, and apparently he’s been fielding fan requests at conventions for years asking when he’s going to do this again.

A franchise like this lives or dies on what it feels like, and casting decisions are often the first thing longtime fans use to judge integrity. Because of this, choosing not to rehire Stewart Copeland is very rare. Copeland is the drummer for the band The Police and is the mastermind behind the original trilogy and Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. He even worked on the first new soundtrack for the Reignited Trilogy and has been speaking highly of the franchise for years, so fans are understandably disappointed.

They Won’t Tell Us Yet

Bob’s toys

For all the group was happy to discuss, the narrative remained closed behind closed doors. When asked if Sparx was coming back, the answer was not a polite one pointing to “more narrative to come.” It’s the same with the thinking behind the headline itself. Whether A Realm Beyond sticks closer to the spirit of the original trilogy or the standalone games that followed received a careful, diplomatic response: its premise is the original trilogy, but Spyro is headed somewhere else.

They are not willing to assure you that the politics of the speaker are not part of the equation here. Despite Spyro’s PlayStation roots and the complex history of Crash’s special, the team was clear that getting the game into more hands was more important than any loyalty to the classic console. The Realm Beyond lives on Xbox, PC, Game Pass, Steam, PS5, and Switch 2 alike, so wherever your particular nostalgia resides, you won’t need to buy new hardware.

A Studio That Knows What It Protects

Bob’s toys

Ultimately, the mechanics may change, the visuals may evolve, but the experience should remain the same. Crashes, by their own definition, are precise and almost statistical. Spyro is free form and experimental. Treating those as separate design languages, rather than two skins on one engine, is the kind of difference that you want the returning team to talk about a lot.

The spring of 2027 is still a long time coming. But for a business that has spent nearly two decades living on memories and guest appearances, hearing the people behind it speak directly about a revival fueled by the flames and name clouds of fans is the first real sign that A Realm Beyond isn’t just selling in name.

Released

2027

Number of Players

Single player