darkSpyro

the reboots were quite necessary from both a financial and a gameplay standpoint. most of this is a combination of educated guesses and research

He needed it because like it or not the series was dying. No one could replicate the classics. Season of ice and flame did better job of it but they could not capture the eccence of spyro. only old imsomniac could have and even then they admitted they could do no more to advance the series.

With the glitch fest, rushed pre-alpha, mess that was Enter the Dragonfly and the sales flop that was A Hero's Tale, the series was dying so it was tossed to krome as a last ditch effort by Sierra.

so it was krome that decided that it would be best for them financially to reboot the gameplay and the series and so krome played a last ditch trump: the origin story. they figured that people were longing for imsomniac spyro; they could not create it due to other companies failing at it so they made a game that was only a spyro game in name.

...and it worked sales spiked and the purple dragon was famous again and spyro gained a bunch of new fans who had never heard of the previous game it made greates hits for playstion 2 and all was good.

then came eternalnight and it did poorly due to it being a dark game that was not as aimed at kids as its precusor.

and so the legend series continued activision's parent company merged Sierra and Activision and dawn of the dragon happened.

we all know what happened there. it grabbed attention again but failed as it was too much of middle earth and not enough spyro not to mention the plotholes and terrible voice acting.

then the movie poster came which was either culled in mid developement or was just an elaborate scam until one day the movie quietly died.

then...there was this dark mysterous interlude where there was litterally nothing released which led to the whole "SPYRO IS DEAD" thing.

during this time it seems that Activision contracted multiple sub-set companies to create concepts of where spyro should go next. it was code-named spyro's kingdom and activision was keeping it under wraps as black as night due to mainly the fact that catering to the fans is usually a bad idea.

one such concept was the pc mmo that has come to the surface, another was what would become skylanders.

it apears the base concept was to expand on the LOS universe either after the fall of malefor, during the first war or between eternal night and dawn of the dragon



what appears is that activision did not immediatly say no as it has a working engine, so it is possible that after the 'M' rated spyro game failed Toy's for Bob tried another concept the toys with brains idea pulling basic gameplay mechanics from what Helios(spyro's kingdom) did.

and it's rather obvious that they suceeded.