Spyro: A Realm Beyond Interview: Toys for Bob On Flight, Tom Kenny, and Coming Home

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 practically had a groove worn into it. Year of the Dragon got even more playtime. The original game came much later for me, and somewhere along the way I played nearly everything else the franchise had to offer, minus Spyro Orange and Season of Ice, because some things are better left untouched. So when Toys for Bob stood up at Summer Game Fest and confirmed Spyro: A Realm Beyond, the first brand-new mainline entry in almost two decades, I wasn't just curious. I needed to know if this was going to be done right.

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

A Decade-Long Detour Through Call of Duty

Toys for Bob's road to A Realm Beyond didn't start with Spyro at all. It started with the Reignited Trilogy, the lovingly rebuilt versions of the original three games, and then with Crash Bandicoot 4 and Crash Team Rumble. Then COVID happened, and Activision Blizzard needed its core teams supporting the bigger machines. Toys for Bob, a team of around 50 people, found itself split off to prop up Warzone and Overwatch 2 for a couple of years.

It wasn't a wasted stretch, exactly. The studio came away from it having worked across new genres, new tools, and teams it had never collaborated with before. But it also wasn't what they signed up to make games for. "We felt that we were straying too far from the types of games that we love to make and that we're known for," the team told me, and you can hear how long that had clearly been sitting with them.

Then Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard kicked off its long, drawn-out journey through regulators, and Toys for Bob used that uncertainty as a window. The pitch they brought to leadership was, by their own admission, unprecedented: buy back their independence, take ownership of their own creative direction, and in the same breath, ask Xbox to back a brand new Spyro game. Nobody had tried this exact move before. They went for it anyway, and now we have the result.

The Team Built A Word Cloud Out Of Your Fan Reactions

When Toys for Bob set out to figure out what flying as Spyro should actually feel like, they didn't just sit around debating it internally. They went through YouTube reactions, TikTok clips, Reddit threads, every corner of the fandom they could find, and pulled out the words that kept repeating. Calm. Blissful. Momentum. Friendship. That became their compass.

It's a slightly funny image, a team of developers building a literal word cloud out of your tweets and comments to decide whether a new flight mechanic earns its place in the game. But it also tells you a lot about how seriously they're treating the gap between what longtime fans remember and what they're building. Original flight in Spyro games was limited: gliding, baby wings, a handful of speedway levels with a timer attached. A Realm Beyond will supposedly throw that out entirely in favor of full, sustained dragon flight.

Tom Kenny Is Back, And He Never Actually Left

If there's one piece of news here that needs no further context, it's this: Tom Kenny is voicing Spyro again. Not a soundalike, not a recast, the actual original voice. According to the team, he walked into the booth already knowing his old catchphrases by heart, no script required, and has apparently been fielding requests from fans at conventions for years asking when he'd get to do this again.

A franchise like this lives or dies on whether it feels like itself, and casting decisions are usually the first thing longtime fans use to judge sincerity. Because of this, the choice not to rehire Stewart Copeland is a lot less popular. Copeland is the drummer of the band The Police and also the creative genius behind composing the soundtrack for the original trilogy and Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. He even worked on a new original track for the Reignited Trilogy and has been speaking extremely positively about the franchise for years, so fans are understandably disappointed.

What They Won't Tell Us Yet

For everything the team was happy to discuss, the narrative stayed firmly behind closed doors. Asked whether Sparx makes a comeback, the answer was a polite non-answer pointing toward "more narrative to come." Same with the reasoning behind the subtitle itself. Even whether A Realm Beyond leans closer to the spirit of the original trilogy or the standalone games that followed got a careful, diplomatic response: their foundation is the original trilogy, but Spyro is heading somewhere new.

What they were willing to confirm is that platform politics aren't part of the equation here. Despite Spyro's PlayStation roots and Crash's own complicated history with exclusivity, the team was clear that getting the game into as many hands as possible matters more than any old console allegiance. A Realm Beyond lands on Xbox, PC, Game Pass, Steam, PS5, and Switch 2 alike, so wherever your particular nostalgia lives, you won't need to go shopping for new hardware.

A Studio That Knows What It's Protecting

Ultimately, the mechanics can change, the visuals can evolve, but the feeling has to stay intact. Crash, by their own description, is precise and almost mathematical. Spyro is freeform and exploratory. Treating those as different design languages, rather than two skins on the same engine, is exactly the kind of distinction you want a returning team to be making out loud.

Spring 2027 is still a long wait. But for a franchise that's spent nearly twenty years living off remasters and guest appearances, hearing the people behind it talk this specifically about flame-fueled updrafts and fan word clouds is the first real sign that A Realm Beyond isn't just trading on the name.