UK site Eurogamer.net once again today bare witness to the spectre of conjecture over a new version of Killer Instinct. A sequel has been rumoured for months, while developer even teased over the series in their latest release, Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Studio big wig Mark Betteridge, a lead engineer on the original fighting title, has said a "revolution" would be necessary to make the sequel worthwhile.

"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," Betteridge enthused.

"At the time there was and 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. And all you do then is make your user-base smaller and smaller and it disappears [to the point where] it's not really feasible anymore."

However, the game maker is confident that the genre could be reinvigorated by "significant change", "revolution", Betteridge offering: "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."

New IPs are apparently among Rare's plans, the developer keen to innovate by forging new genres. More soon.

By Luke Guttridge