Banjo-Kazooie started as a game about a boy. After finishing Donkey Kong Country 2, the original Donkey Kong Country team at Rare began a Super Nintendo adventure called Project Dream, about “a boyish adventurer” named Edison who fell in with a gang of inept pirates. “It was definitely a convoluted route,” designer Gregg Mayles told Retro Gamer in 2007. The project moved to the Nintendo 64, Edison was dropped as “too generic”, a rabbit that ran on two legs came and went, and then the team tried a bear. “People liked the bear, the bear became Banjo, Project Dream became Banjo-Kazooie.” The bird in his backpack came last of all.
Fast facts
- Developer: Rare, Twycross. Gregg Mayles; lead programmer Chris Sutherland; music by Grant Kirkhope.
- Publisher: Nintendo. Released in the summer of 1998; in Britain on 17 July, at about £50.
- Shown first: at E3 in June 1997.
- Heroes: Banjo, a honey bear, and Kazooie, a red-crested breegull, out to rescue Banjo’s little sister Tooty from the witch Gruntilda.
- Reviews: Edge 8/10; N64 Magazine 92%.
A bear and a bird
Kazooie was a solution to a design problem. “Initially Kazooie didn’t even exist; it was just Banjo on his own,” Mayles said. He traced her to the planning of Banjo’s abilities, when the team wanted him to have “a traditional ‘double-jump’” to get out of trouble in mid-air. N64 Magazine saw the point at once: Banjo “doesn’t need a Wing Cap to fly because he has Kazooie”, and he does not need a double jump because Kazooie’s wings flap to lift him. The two are one character with a very long list of moves, “cunningly disguised as an all-new invention. Clever work, Rare.”
The moves arrive through the game. Bottles, a short-sighted mole, pops out of molehills to teach them. Kazooie’s legs can carry Banjo, faster and up steeper slopes; her wings lift him higher; she fires eggs forwards and backwards; she flies from red flight pads, spending a red feather for each flap; and gold feathers make the pair briefly invincible. The shaman Mumbo, paid in Mumbo tokens, turns Banjo into other creatures in some worlds: in the swamp a little crocodile immune to its piranhas, and in the last world a bee. Edge thought these transformations the game’s “strongest facet”.
Nine worlds and a witch’s lair
Gruntilda’s Lair is the hub, an enormous set of caverns with doors to nine worlds. Each world holds ten golden jigsaw pieces, or “Jiggies”, 100 musical notes and five Jinjos, small creatures in hiding who give a Jiggy when all five are found. Jiggies complete pictures in the lair that open new worlds; notes open the “note doors” that lead further in. The worlds follow familiar themes, a desert island with crabs, pirates and a wrecked ship, a swamp, a snowy peak with a giant snowman, a desert of pyramids, a haunted world and an industrial one, and the last, Click Clock Wood, is the same forest four times over, once for each season. “Once a theme for a world had been chosen,” Sutherland said, “we brainstormed as many ideas as possible that you would expect to see in such a location, then used these ideas to shape the world, before adding a twist of humour as the finishing touch.” Gruntilda speaks in rhyme throughout, and near the end Banjo must win a quiz show about her.
To fill those worlds Sutherland had to work the machine hard. Backgrounds used very large textures, cut into 64-pixel squares, “the largest texture size the N64 could draw”, so that they did not have to repeat. As the camera moved, the game kept throwing out what could not be seen and loading what came into view, and the constant shuffling left memory in fragments. Rare wrote “a proprietary system that ‘reshuffled’ memory continuously as you played to eliminate the fragmentation”, Sutherland said, and the space it saved went into more polygons for the characters and scenery.
Music that moves
Grant Kirkhope wrote the score, and it was one of the game’s tricks. The music played as MIDI data on the console, so each instrument could be faded in or out as Banjo moved between areas, changing the arrangement around him; under water the music went muffled. Edge called the soundtrack “a fine demonstration of interactive audio, with music blending between areas”. The Grant Kirkhope entry explains how it worked.
Reception
Every review measured it against Super Mario 64. Edge gave it eight out of ten. It thought the game “a towering technical achievement” that did for N64 graphics what Donkey Kong Country had done on the Super Nintendo, but was disappointed by the rest: “beneath the good looks this is platforming-by-numbers”, the puzzles tested “physical dexterity rather than mental agility”, and the camera failed under water. N64 Magazine gave it 92% and an admission that it had played for sixteen hours at a stretch. Only about ten of the hundred Jiggies set “a genuinely innovative challenge”, it said, but “Mario’s still king but Banjo-Kazooie is worthy company for him.” Rare’s own team said they never set out to beat Mario. “Setting out with the intention of making an ‘improved version’ of another game would be quite uninspiring to work on,” Sutherland said.
Later history
Banjo-Tooie followed on the Nintendo 64 in 2000. After Microsoft bought Rare in 2002, the pair returned in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (2008) for the Xbox 360, and the original game was re-released on Xbox Live Arcade. It is also in the Xbox One compilation Rare Replay, and on 20 January 2022 it reached the Nintendo Switch through Nintendo’s subscription service, with Rare’s blessing. Former Rare developers at the studio Playtonic made Yooka-Laylee, which Wireframe called “a conscious throwback to Banjo-Kazooie”.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 36, 2007, pp. 18–24, “The Making of Banjo-Kazooie”: Project Dream, Edison and the pirates, the move to the N64, the rabbit and the bear; Mayles and Sutherland quoted; Kazooie and the double jump; the “Mario 64 beater” question; Bottles; the textures and the memory system; the worlds; the music.
- Edge issue 61, August 1998, pp. 82–84: review, eight out of ten (the Donkey Kong Country team, Tooty and Gruntilda, Bottles, the camera, notes, note doors and Jiggies, Mumbo, nine areas, the quiz, the music, the verdict).
- N64 Magazine issue 17, July 1998, pp. 33–39: preview of the finished game (Banjo and Kazooie, the moves, flight pads and red feathers, gold feathers, Jiggies, notes and Jinjos, the lair, the crocodile, Freezeezy Peak).
- N64 Magazine issue 18, August 1998, pp. 65–67: review, 92% (Click Clock Wood’s seasons, the bee, sixteen hours, “Mario’s still king”).
- Nintendo Power issue 109, June 1998, p. 6 (E3 1997) and pp. 4–11 (Gruntilda, Tooty, items and the nine worlds).
- Nintendo Official Magazine issue 70, July 1998, p. 42: British release date.
- Computer and Video Games issue 200, July 1998, p. 31: the pirate ship, swamp, pyramids, snowman and the four seasons of Click Clock Wood.
- Edge issue 93, January 2001, p. 88: Banjo-Tooie review.
- Retro Gamer: The ZX Spectrum Book (2012), p. 35: Rare’s list of games, including Banjo Kazooie (Xbox Live Arcade) and Nuts & Bolts.
- Wireframe issue 53, July 2021, p. 37: Yooka-Laylee, “designed by former Rare devs who worked on that series”.
- Video Games Chronicle, “Banjo-Kazooie is coming to Nintendo Switch Online in January 2022”, 10 December 2021 (web, secondary): Rare’s statement naming Rare Replay; iMore, 19 January 2022 (web, secondary): the date of 20 January. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/banjo-kazooie-is-coming-to-nintendo-switch-online-in-january-2022