After 11 years of development, 6 years of marketing, and a full reboot, Rare's Everwild has been canceled amid mass Xbox layoffs – 5 months after Phil Spencer's assurances it's making "progress"

Everwild, the gorgeous but mysterious Rare title first announced back in 2019, has been canceled amid the mass layoffs happening today at Xbox. Rare has not yet confirmed the news, but three separate reports now suggest that the game is, indeed, dead.

News of Everwild's cancellation was first reported by VGC, which mentioned that "employees are likely to lose their jobs as part of broader restructuring" at the studio. IGN's sources have also corroborated that the game is canceled, as has Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who first reported on today's Xbox layoffs.

We'd seen a handful of trailers for Everwild, which offered promises of a big adventure through a strange world filled with unusual animals. The exact details of the gameplay were never clear, but the almost Studio Ghibli-like vibes were enough to catch plenty of attention. Earlier this year, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that the game was still making "progress."

Reports circulated that Everwild's development had been rebooted in 2021, though Xbox representatives suggested those reports were "a little more extreme" than the truth. However, those same reports alleged that Everwild had been in some form of development since 2014, and a game rarely spends that long in development without some sort of trouble behind the scenes.

EVERWILD - X019 - Announce Trailer - YouTube

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What the cancellation and the looming layoffs mean for the future of Rare remains to be seen. The studio has a storied history going back to the British computer scene of the '80s, and was a prolific NES developer in its early days. It developed a close partnership with Nintendo throughout the '90s, during which it created the beloved Donkey Kong Country trilogy for the SNES, as well as titles such as GoldenEye 007, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark for the N64.

Microsoft's acquisition of Rare in the early '00s shocked the gaming world at the time, and while many of the studio's games under Xbox were quite good - I'll defend Viva Pinata and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts forever - they never made quite the same impact as the earlier Nintendo titles.

After years supporting Xbox's ill-fated Kinect peripheral, Rare seemed to finally find its footing with Sea of Thieves, which, while it took some time to really find its footing, proved to be an excellent multiplayer sandbox. Everwild had the potential to be a strong follow-up, but I guess now we'll never know.

I expect we'll lose a few more upcoming Xbox Series X games before the day is out.