Do we REALLY need a new Banjo-Kazooie game?
Okay, so this one got pretty long. Before it goes any further, I want to add a few disclaimers for fans of Banjo-Kazooie who might be reading this:
FIRST POINT: I have been a fan of the Banjo-Kazooie games from a very young age. I played the first game on a hand-me-down N64 with my brother, explored every world, completed it to 100% multiple times over and drank in the Stop n’ Swop research and rumours circulating YouTube and the Rare Witch Project forums in its heyday. Despite the confusion and frustration of seeing the change in direction as an exclusive to Xbox 360 (as well as maybe one piece of anonymous immature hate mail), I bought that console with my own money just to play it and became subsequently obsessed with the vehicle-building system. Some of my old creations are still saved on the console to this day and you can even see my name in the hours-long credits of Yooka-Laylee as a Kickstarter fund backer.
SECOND POINT: For the sake of non-fans, or even non-gamers who may be reading and have no idea what on earth I was just talking about and don’t feel like getting all that context from a wiki, I’m going to refer to select elements of each game and bits of terminology in more generalised ways to get the basic gist across and not get overly bogged down in too many in-depth explanations. The purpose of that will be so I can use the context to jump off into the actually substantial points that inspired me to write this article in the first place, because I’m going to be applying and pulling at reference points beyond just this game series. So if it sounds like I’m mixing elements up or leaving stuff out entirely, just know that I’m entirely aware of it and it’s really not the most important thing in the world when compared to my final point.
FINAL POINT: Those same fans of Banjo-Kazooie are going to be reading stuff in this article that they aren’t going to want to hear. No, this isn’t going to end with some edgy clickbait provocation; this piece is as long as it is for a good reason, and my conclusions have more to do with fandoms in general and the whole concept of a fandom in perpetuating a capitalist machine that large companies have been oiling up for decades. As a games designer who follows industry and media development very closely, I’m going to be writing about how even the simplest notions or ideas can require a lot of factors to set in motion. This means divulging in a lot of uncomfortable truths.
Right then: Rare Ltd.
A game studio situated in and around the English countryside land of Twycross. Used to be called Ultimate for a few years back when they made games for the technicolour bleep-bloop ZX Spectrum computers in the 1980s. The studio was staffed by absolute tech wizards who were known for getting more out of new pieces of hardware than almost anyone else was even aware they could get away with using. When Nintendo boldly claimed that their Nintendo Entertainment System console was totally impenetrable and could never be reverse-engineered in a million years, Rare went ahead and said “how bout i do anyway”. This being in the time before Nintendo just threw a cease and desist at anything that looked at them funny, they instead decided to enter a partnership with Rare and by the time their SUPER Nintendo Entertainment System was released, they had a stake in 49% of the studio, giving them the best of both worlds: creative freedom and financial safety. When the Nintendo 64 was on the market, Rare had by then invested in a bunch of silicon computer graphics tech, were handed the keys to the old Nintendo character Donkey Kong to do with it whatever they wanted and made a whole bunch of games on the side that ended up putting them on the map: the Donkey Kong Country Trilogy, Goldeneye, Diddy Kong Racing, Jet Force Gemini and a whole bunch of others that I can’t be bothered to list here because I’m not writing this piece just to make lists. What is important is Project Dream.
Project Dream for the Super Nintendo was designed to be just one game.
It was about a boy with a wooden sword on an island full of dinosaurs battling pirates who were trying to imbue their fleets with the power of flight. It was an idea that the team at Rare were no longer all that excited about after years of banging their heads against it and getting almost nowhere, creatively speaking. So they decided to stick with what they knew: cartoon animals and beating Nintendo at their own game. Two years after they got a look at what Super Mario 64 was doing, Rare brought out their answer as Dreams: Land of Giants became ‘Banjo-Kazooie’; the story of Banjo, a pudgy, timid bear and Kazooie, a smart aleck bird who lived in his backpack, both travelling over hill and underground to stop Gruntilda (or Grunty) the evil and ugly witch from dismantling their idyllic cottage livelihoods. The only reason this game got a sequel was because there was literally too much content to fit into what they’d just released, let alone to implement before the summer season. They already had to scrap four-way multiplayer, a whole epilogue chapter with another playable character and an ambitious, but highly questionable data transfer system wherein a player would swap out one game for another while the console was still technically turned on.
If the team at Rare had stuck to their original plans while continuing to find shortcuts around the hardware limits while simultaneously pushing them past their capabilities, the first Banjo-Kazooie game would likely have been in development long into the new millennium by which point, they’d have had to skip an entire console generation.
Again.
The final game as it exists now had the two eponymous main characters ascending Gruntilda’s lair by conquering nine worlds, the entrances to which were hidden all around and locked off by incomplete jigsaw puzzles. As far back as 1997 however, there were plans for as many as sixteen worlds and those that didn’t make the cut were mostly pulled apart and put back together for Donkey Kong 64 and the game’s own direct sequel, Banjo-Tooie. This latter game embodied the idea of “more is more”: more abilities for the player, more characters to meet, more areas to explore, more things to collect and use, more activities to do, more story beats, more enemies, more ideas, more secrets, more things being thrown at the proverbial wall. Oh yeah, and the multiplayer made it in this time.
This wasn’t the only ambitious project at Rare that suffered from feature creep due to spending such a long time in the oven. In fact, with the way this studio was set up by founding brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, it wasn’t just a common occurrence; it was practically by design. Each team working on their own game at the countryside development studio was sectioned off from each-other into “barns”, never to interact with or take notes from one another while simultaneously being pitted in direct competition with each-other to outdo their friend’s own projects. Whatever their neighbours were working on, they had no idea; all they knew is that they had to best each-other at all costs. While this did result in stellar quality games and a winning reputation with press and fans on the outside, the consequence of such tense internal politics was felt with overworked employees, staff walkouts, last-minute changes amid protracted development cycles and a few financial set backs due to a slow decline in sales figures, all just to keep that winning reputation in check. Only when public trade shows rolled around were members of the barns finally able to see what everyone else was up to and it was after one of these trade shows in 1997 that one of Rare’s most infamous games came to be conceived.
The barn developing Twelve Tales: Conker 64 (aka Conker’s Quest) had no idea what Banjo-Kazooie even was until they were profoundly trounced by it on the E3 show floor. As a result, almost every inch of their cutesy mascot platformer about a squirrel collecting birthday presents in a storybook land was scrapped (aside from a Game Boy Color spin-off). In its place was a total demographic u-turn in the form of Conker’s Bad Fur Day: a raunchy, action-packed, mature-themed, booze-swilling pastiche of cutesy animal mascot gaming, filled with blood, guns, death, sex, film parodies and stuffed teddy bears dressed as Nazis.
Despite rave reviews, Conker’s Bad Fur Day was the very last game to be released for the Nintendo 64, right before the world was starting to move on towards new technology. Nintendo’s European arm refused to distribute the game outright, meaning that another company THQ had to step in instead, but at least the game actually made it to release. One other game being developed around this time, Rare’s long-awaited answer to Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series ‘Dinosaur Planet’ had to be repurposed for the upcoming Nintendo Gamecube just as it was nearing completion for its now outdated predecessor. By the time it was being converted and retooled for the new Nintendo console, Rare’s luster clearly must have worn off in their partner’s eyes. Despite their critical reputation, they were likely worried if games like Dinosaur Planet would ever make enough money to account for all the time spent in development, let alone whatever else Rare had set to a slow roast. Nintendo’s decision to slap one of their named franchises over Dinosaur Planet and rename it Star Fox Adventures was done in the hopes that brand recognition could save it from total failure, because they were known for recurring franchises with safe, repeatable patterns and iterative gameplay additions, while the risky attitude inherent to Rare would have been seen as more trouble than it was worth. But at least Microsoft saw some worth in them; $375 million of worth to be exact.
After Nintendo declined to continue the partnership, the new kid on the block Xbox was Rare’s new home. All they had to do now was move their games over to yet another new console and diversify its debut games line-up. Everything was smooth sailing from here: the restrictive “barn” culture was gone, the founding Stamper brothers were soon to be on their way out and with all the space afforded by new corporate foster parents to stretch their legs and get cosy, now was the beginning of a new-wait a minute…what’s everyone saying about a “Banjo-Threeie” all of a sudden? We already made a Banjo-Tooie and we even have a Game Boy spin-off coming soon, what’s making them think that…oh.
Oh yeah.
The game’s lead designer Gregg Mayles said in retrospect that this sequel tease at the end of Banjo-Tooie was supposed to be a joke; a ridiculous moniker for a flippantly proposed follow up to a story that had very clearly tied all the loose ends up about as definitively as anyone else possibly could. They’re playing kickball alongside the witches own defected minion sidekick using Grunty’s severed skull at the top of her own now utterly conquered fortress of doom, for pete’s sake! How can that witch possibly get her revenge at this point? What’s she going to do, bite their legs off? This joke had clearly gone over many people’s heads however, because when you mention the idea of sequels in a franchise-minded economy, even with a game series as irreverently humorous as this one, you’re expected to deliver on it. Aside from things like Donkey Kong though, Rare wasn’t exactly a sequel-rich company; only if technology or a new concept warranted it would they ever consider making a follow up to one of their titles…but of course there’s going to be another Banjo-Kazooie game, right? There has to be! Rare promised it and they can do no wrong!
And thus, the patient wait for the nebulous “Banjo-Threeie” began.
As fans busied themselves with Game Boy spin-off titles during the long wait, more of Banjo-Kazooie’s contemporaries were starting to either reinvent themselves or follow the monster success of a little game called Grand Theft Auto 3. Beyond the likes of Super Mario, more companies were moving away from open-ended platforming traversal, recognising more could be done with the “go anywhere, do anything” promise of full 3D gaming. Rare considered at first, the possibility of a semi-remake for the first game, but decided that changing too much or too little of it would alienate too many people either way. Their next idea was to pit the player against Gruntilda the Witch as a complex A.I. character that adapted and reacted to every action they made. This proved too ambitious and time-consuming even for a games console more powerful than the one they were currently developing for. Eventually, a trailer to announce the existence of Banjo and Kazooie’s nebulous return made its debut at Microsoft’s X06 conference in 2006. The new cubic art style intended to echo the original game’s graphics already got things set off on the wrong foot with fans, and this was before the massive shift in gameplay style was revealed.
A desire to provide more engaging means of travel across environments in addition to further opportunities for emergent and expressive play is what led to Rare throwing away a lot of what came before in favour of a versatile and highly expressive vehicle-building system. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, despite its favourable critical reception and some genuinely innovative ideas in 2008, was immensely polarising for fans, with many declaring this to be the moment when Rare finally “died” in their eyes. Making matters worse for the Twycross studio was the fact that this game was just yet another sales disappointment in an increasingly long line of sales disappointments. Most of their titles originally planned for the Gamecube were struggling to fit in with the frat-house shaking, Mountain Dew swilling, Halo Combat Evolving ecosystem that had now become unavoidably synonymous with Xbox over the years.
Microsoft didn’t know what to do with Rare and Rare didn’t know what to do with themselves. So began a period of spinning wheels as the company was funnelled from one project to another as Microsoft tried in vain to reach out beyond its key demographic. A full body motion control camera? Let Rare make a few sports game for it. Custom digital avatars? Have Rare design the interface and sculpt out the visual options. A kart-racing game? A dedicated game creation tool? Lend some of Rare’s legacy characters over to offer glorified cameo appearances. The roads for most of these ventures wound up in dead ends and it took years for them to finally refocus themselves and regain their footing once more. Xbox debuted their wildly lucrative Game Pass service and doubled down on preserving their vast library of games for future generations, while Rare compiled all their landmark games, successes and failures alike, into a best-selling compilation disc for the masses to revisit. They even got to revisit that old pirate concept of theirs from way back in the days of Project Dream. In applying their quirky perspective and personality to the growing trend of live-service games, Rare masterfully pitched to their bosses ‘Sea of Thieves’, a vast online pirate ecosystem where merry crews of player-controlled swashbuckling friends could sing shanties, dig for treasure, hunt sea monsters, fire cannons, fight skeletons, and eat bananas with Disney’s Jack Sparrow. Now with a new non-combat focused, nature-cultivating online world of Everwild on their minds, it’s safe to say that Rare’s growing pains are over and have found a new place in the gaming landscape where they can finally get comfy. Now how about that Banjo-Kazooie sequel? Wait…ANOTHER ONE??
My best guess here is that Rare had so little faith in how Nuts & Bolts would be received by fans that this probably seemed like their way of saying “don’t worry if you didn’t like this one; maybe whatever we create next will make up for it!” And what’s happened between then and the writing of this article in regards to a new game? There’s been plenty of merchandise to mollify fans in more recent years and a long-requested appearance in the crossover fighting game Super Smash Bros. Ultimate finally came to reality with thunderous praise from many corners of the game industry, but nobody will be truly happy it seems until they get that new game.
But after years of waiting with them, I have to wonder: would there be much merit at all in making a new game?
Ever since Nuts & Bolts fizzled off the Earth, a plethora of retro 3D platformer throwbacks and revivals have entered the scene, the most prominent of these arguably being Yooka-Laylee, a game that attempted to pick up the gameplay mantle right where Banjo-Kazooie left off with many of the same original team members, design philosophies and even the same music composer from way back when. It delivered where it mattered for some people, but also seemed to miss the forest for the trees in other respects, leading to an overall reception that was arguably even more divisive than the game that replaced its jumping and puzzle-solving with “dumb-ass” vehicles. This proves that even sticking to what fans say they want isn’t always a guaranteed win, especially when Yooka-Laylee’s own follow-up release starting taking more after Donkey Kong Country instead, injecting some inventive structure-bending twists in the process that resulted in a much warmer critical reception. Some fans have marked themselves down for a remake of the first two Nintendo 64 games after Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon made a similar return to the limelight courtesy of their remastered trilogy releases. But despite the effort put into those games, you can bet that people had some grievances to air out anyway. Some integral subtleties of the original games’ presentations were arguably lost in translation while some of the more modern technical polishes seemed just a little bit “off” when married with the new artistic directions.
A remake of the first two Banjo-Kazooie games, be it as simple as a coat of paint or as drastic as being able to swap between old and new styles with the press of a button like Halo: Anniversary would have to factor in camera movement, story scenes, character models, animation, textures, particle effects, environment art, colour schemes, sound design and music. Any blemish however slight could undeniably have a ripple effect and come under heavy scrutiny for “not feeling the same as it did before”, even if it stuck as close as it could to the old way of doing things. Even if they got it right, the effort probably wouldn’t be in aid of much anyway, especially when everyone already has access to the original games, ready to buy and download on the Xbox store and stream over the internet with an official Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Whether fans get a sequel, a remake, a reboot, a reimagining, a remaster or a re-whatever for modern systems, even with an exclusivity deal for a Nintendo console like the good ol’ days (yeah right, in your dreams), that would be far from the end of it. If you give people enough of something, they’re eventually going to want more of it. The end goal is never usually just one more game or one more relaunch; they want to feel the elation of seeing their favourite games or movies or TV shows “return” over and over again and see them continue to return in the same way that Star Wars or Marvel continues to make returns.
The reason that franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, Pokemon, Super Mario, Call of Duty and Fortnite can keep coming back in ways that are “different but also the same” is because they are built on easily iterative concepts and easy to follow formulas. Ratchet and Clank always scour the cosmos for bolts and screws as a currency to purchase and upgrade an arsenal of ridiculously cartoonish guns. Samus Aran always begins a Metroid game by losing every last bit of gear from last time and always ends it by setting a planet or space station to self-destruct. Umbrella Corp is always up to their no-good tricks and manage to affect the events of each new Resident Evil game to some degree, even if only during a glorified cameo. Every animated Pixar movie has a plot that involves a central character challenging the status-quo before a series of improbable adventures reaffirms it again with a slight change to make everybody happy. The villains in Batman always cheat death and get away at some point so they can return again next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel.
People love consistent repeatable formulas. Even when a seemingly fundamental alteration is introduced to the world of the characters or the gameplay such as say, a talking hat that lets you possess other creatures and objects or half the living beings of the entire universe being turned to literal dust, the formula itself will remain eternal. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk across; heavily lucrative series like Guitar Hero fell out of favour because for all the songs and visuals that could be changed and carried over, not enough change was introduced in the face of so many games flooding the market every single year. It’s also why Dance Dance Revolution has just barely managed to survive in spite of it falling out of trend in the western market due to it’s never-changing gameplay, because Konami eventually learned to dial back on the releases and give their core fans some more time to drink in each new game for a bit.
Sonic the Hedgehog (in 3D at least) hasn’t stuck to a consistent, repeatable gameplay formula for years and most new games will tend to replace old creative styles, gameplay functions, character attitudes and entire backstories with all new ones, because everything in the games that came before them was explored pretty much to its fullest extent already and there wasn’t much of a way to iterate on it any further. This has resulted in a wild lack of consistency and experiential continuity between games that also plagued Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon for the longest time before they were finally given a high-definition makeover. Super Mario gets a pass though, because his games sub-series are always clearly delineated in terms of activities and mediums. The character has also lent his likeness to so many games and properties by now that fans are far more permissive of fundamental changes arguably than others would be of say, Ghostbusters. There are still plenty of game series like TimeSplitters, Silent Hill and Duke Nukem that were ripe for iteration and which both fans and original developers alike wanted desperately to keep going until various machinations beyond their control twisted their hands. It’s a different story when a game or movie property was never truly designed to get a follow-up, but the ever-spinning, ever-demanding corporate expansionist gears serve to grind one into motion anyway. You might get a product that was worth the effort even if it ends up making varying degrees of changes like Luigi’s Mansion 3 or Kid Icarus Uprising, but you could also just as likely end up with something hollow and redundant like Mary Poppins Returns, An American Werewolf in Paris and the prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing remake of the loose novella adaptation.
Every fan has at least some idea of what they would like to see for a completely new game if one were to make the attempt at taking up the “Banjo-Threeie” mantle, but such concepts are all seemingly pitched on the basis that they would be predicated on a highly specific combination of base elements that comprised the first two games. Fans say they want a lot of things (as do I), but envisioning how an idea plays out in one’s head is a different matter entirely to designing, prototyping, balancing, implementing and making it all work in tandem together, all before even figuring out if the end result is actually fun to play with. The fact is, we have been marinated in the first two games since the year 2000 and thus, can’t really uncouple ourselves from their objective qualities that newcomers are far likelier to experience more clearly themselves. Things like the basic act of swimming getting a sudden spike in danger during the second world of the first game when Snacker the Shark is seen roaming the waters, not to mention the deep-dives for items in the sewer world immediately after that. Timed races that even at the first game’s mid-point require lightning-fast reflexes and expert timing to beat with almost two seconds to spare and the level design of the sequel where every path twists and turns, doubles back and links together in unexpected ways that even for me feel like a slog to navigate, especially when there’s only a scant few guides or waypoints to be found in the game proper.
I myself distinctly remember when the first Banjo-Kazooie game was just as brand new for me as it is now for any newcomer looking into the games and uploading blind play-through impression videos online. My older self would likely be tearing their hair out in frustration over how long it’s taking for my younger self to connect the dots. That same younger self who got the game as a hand-me-down didn’t even know for months how to walk up a steep hill and see the rest of the game beyond the first world because they weren’t even aware that the walking-up-a-steep-hill Talon Trot ability even existed. Every play session that followed has informed the next to the point that I now know of every secret and every strategy like the back of my hand. The point is, just because we know how a game works, doesn’t mean that one can assume newcomers or even other fans will get it in the same way too, let alone pick up a brand new game with all those older design principles applied to it and just as quickly get on the same wavelength as everyone else.
So with that all said, how does one make Banjo-Kazooie into a long-running series with multiple games? Improving or innovating on long standing potential flaws would be a start, but it wouldn’t be enough; how can their commonly shared elements be iterated upon? What are these common shared elements and can they work together? How could the seeds for a modern ongoing Banjo-Kazooie game franchise be created under the safest possible conditions given the recent developments in game design and the cultural shifts that informed those changes? Full disclosure: this is not going to be a wish list. This is not going to be “a new game should be this way because I think it should be”. There are many different forms this could take and all of them have every chance of failing. So, far from trying to write a definitive design document, I’m going to try exploring multiple options all at once.
Let’s begin at the beginning: with the story. The story for every game always involves Banjo and Kazooie’s lives in their home of Spiral Mountain being interrupted or impeded in some way by the seethingly jealous and power-hungry Gruntilda the witch. Stopping her plans will involve travelling to distant worlds and making progress by completing objectives and aiding various other characters in need. After gathering all their friends together, they finally face off against Grunty in a final climactic battle, after which she inevitably loses and declares revenge as Banjo, Kazooie and all of their new colleagues celebrate in harmony. Nuts & Bolts ended with Gruntilda punished for her crimes by being forced to perform menial work in the dank and dirty basements of a large video game factory. Her revenge this time is spelled out a bit more specifically than before: by making a devious video game of her own. Would the end result of this be to have the game spill out into the real world so she can remake everything with the influence of her magical powers? Everyone is joking about how they know they are all in a video game, so it wouldn’t be completely out of the question. Alternatively, would the witch want to have the heroes trapped inside of her game so they can be toyed around with for her amusement? Would she stop at just the main characters and decide to trap even more creatures and friends inside of a Matrix-style digital universe of her own design? Would this result in some attempts at more topical meta-humour at the expense of the meta-verse? Would the “distant worlds” take on the form of games within games or games adjacent to the game they are trapped in that the bear and bird can transfer themselves between?
Given how the series prides itself on continuity, it would be highly unlikely for a new game to wipe the slate clean and start completely afresh with an all new premise. But given how multiple time jumps have occurred from the start of each new game release relative to how many years have passed since the ones that came before, would a new game have to start from a similar time jump? That would all depend on when a new game is being made, if at all. Despite a whole decade of time passing between the first game and the last, many other characters still appear to have a case of Disney sidekick syndrome, in that the world seems to age even as they themselves don’t. Even fictional characters can only stay young for so long after all, something that Nuts & Bolts called direct attention to with a string of oh-so-classy fat jokes. Would the context of an explicitly all-digital world mean ageing the characters down once again? Perhaps a simpler way around this would be to retell the story of the first few games in a condensed bite-sized form, similar to how the first ten minutes of every Evil Dead sequel was technically a quick recap remake of “the story so far”. How much deviation from the ending to Nuts & Bolts could this allow for without completely negating everything that was already considered “canon”? Could the characters be reintroduced as colliding personalities akin to the ageless cartoon characters from the Looney Tunes? Where could the story be developed from there and most importantly of all, how would this influence the context for all the gameplay trappings?
Firstly, golden jigsaw pieces will be collected and used to gain access to locked-off locations in a specific linear sequence, the entrances to which are all spread across a large hub world environment. Sometimes these “jiggies” must be plugged into an incomplete puzzle frame separated both spatially and sequentially from the main entrance its designed for, sometimes they’re given to the magic priest character Master Jiggywiggy so a timed jigsaw mini-game can be completed and sometimes they’re carried in bulk before being physically transported to a bank in the middle of the hub while the player tries to shake police off of their tail. Would a new game want to cherry-pick only one of these elements or offer alterations? Banjo-Tooie let players unlock multiple worlds at once if they had enough jiggies to do so. What if two puzzle frames are right next to each-other and the player only has enough to complete one of them in the moment? What if partially restoring puzzle frames with a unique arrangement of pieces allowed for similarly partial access to a world without needing to complete it fully? What if the jiggies could literally fill in missing pieces of the physical world itself and fit into gaps of many different sizes all at once? Solving puzzles and traversing obstacles among other challenges will be the key method of attaining these jiggies, each conquered with a swiss army knife of abilities that combine complementary talents inherent to both bear and bird.
A finite supply of golden musical notes will be strung throughout each world to vaguely guide players along their adventure, because the two main characters are named after musical instruments and the presentation is highly musical in nature, boasting a lot of sound design innovations too. The collectible musical notes are essentially meant to reward the player for exploring the worlds as much as possible; any space that doesn’t have musical notes strung through it has already been explored at least once already. The one exception is the Nintendo 64 version of the first Banjo-Kazooie game wherein, possibly because of hardware limitations, notes repopulate the world after a player leaves via the exit pad or loses all their health, forcing them to recollect the notes all over again just to boost their overall “note score” tally. Would this be factored into the challenge of a new game as players are forced to tread lightly and spend their notes only when needed like the currency found in Dark Souls and Bloodborne? If they are used to lead players through an area by the nose and familiarise them with certain important locations, should the player be tasked with collecting a small bunch of them all in one go as part of a quick traversal challenge before they can be banked?
In any case, these musical notes act as the universal currency, used for any purpose from dissolving magical doors to purchasing items and bribing stationary characters into teaching them new abilities to aid with swimming, flying, running up steep slopes or disgorging eggs as ammunition. The friendly Bottles the Mole (or a vaguely established relative of his) will be the one to provide access to these new abilities while a magical, ethnically stereotyped shaman, be it the hut-dwelling Mumbo Jumbo or Humba Wumba in her Native American wigwam, will be on hand to provide magical access to unique areas and traits that the bear and bird could never have attained by themselves. This would include lifting heavy ordinance, imbuing objects with new properties or transforming the bear and bird into something completely different. Health and stamina is represented in each game with honeycomb pieces and players can extend their maximum health pool through secret collectibles in a token commitment to stat-building. These secret items were replaced with the all-purpose musical notes in Nuts & Bolts, as were the collectibles needed to supply the shaman characters with magical potency. Would a new game take this approach too in the same way that Yooka-Laylee also did for the most part with its Tonic system? Could the stat building be taken even further into the realm of permanent specialisation akin to role playing games like Final Fantasy or Fallout?
Banjo-Tooie brought every single core ability back wholesale from the first game with all the same controls, commands and items fully intact before introducing all new ones to be purchased on top of them in addition to temporary genre shifts for mini-game activities and wholly separate playable characters. The Game Boy title Grunty’s Revenge only partially restored abilities from both games due to the handheld gaming device having fewer buttons with which to pull them off and an angled perspective that couldn’t be rotated. Nuts & Bolts meanwhile distilled the function and purpose of each ability into easily swappable components and contraptions to create machines that wouldn’t look out of place in a Wallace & Gromit short film. In practice, this meant the player was given a level of freedom that previous games sorely lacked in comparison. Similar to many immersive sims such as Dishonored Zelda Breath of the Wild, there was technically no “wrong” way to complete a challenge and thereby attain several additional bonus jiggies as a reward for thinking outside the box.
Abilities and magical powers in previous games meanwhile, relied on the player collecting a healthy supply of strictly ordained items to use as “fuel”, or finding a specifically designated area of the environment from which they were allowed to activate an ability. Even before Banjo-Tooie expanded the move-set, there were plenty of abilities and magical transformations that saw only minimal use for certain puzzles compared to others. During the ending to Nuts & Bolts, Banjo and Kazooie receive a physical box filled with all their abilities from the first few games (however that works, you tell me), possibly as a way to let the fans down lightly just in case somebody out there eventually got in the mood to making a new game, maybe, hopefully, possibly don’t hold your breath. But would this actually work for a new game? Those old abilities required players to hold and press multiple buttons in conjunction with each-other in ways that at its worst, felt like playing twister with their fingers. How would a new game accommodate for players with the kind of bone or muscle problems that can impede their ability to power through basic simon-says button-mashing movie scenes?
Games like Metroid give their main character a complete move-set reboot from the start with good reason: to keep new players in the loop without needing to familiarise themselves with previous series entries so any game can potentially be their “first”, while also allowing the space for game designers to swap out old abilities for new ones where new gameplay opportunities can present themselves. Imagine if the latest Metroid game loaded players down with every single ability from all the previous games right from the moment they were given control with only a brief text box of explanation for each. That’s exactly what Banjo-Tooie does and time has not been kind to this approach. Even if all the old abilities were spread more thinly throughout the game, it would be far too overstuffed to keep track of everything from a design or play perspective. Could the abilities inherent to Banjo-Kazooie then be condensed into a more standardised control method? Instead of unique button combinations, could they instead be swapped between on the fly like costumes?
The closest equivalent to this would be the individual mini-figure characters in the licensed property Lego games, which themselves boast a similar approach to Banjo-Kazooie in terms of environmental puzzle solving. Could new abilities be applied in a more universally malleable sense so that two or more options could offer equally valid alternatives to a situation or predicament? They can still be limited by collectible usage as to avoid nullifying most of the challenges, a thought that Yooka-Laylee did not account for with its game-breaking, self-replenishing stamina meter. But in that case then, which items would these moves be limited by? Would there be dedicated items for select powers and abilities, or would they be streamlined and all pull from one primary item reserve? What if the very nature of the two main character’s cooperative tendencies could influence which abilities could be performed? So, if one of the duo found themselves impeded, strengthened or altered in some way, this would serve to change how an ability could be performed and what kind of effect it would have.
Puzzles and challenges in each world of a Banjo-Kazooie game can be taken on in any order the player desires, seemingly to try and soften the harsh difficulty spikes that occur. The thinking is that if one area, or even an entire world is giving them trouble, they can skip it and come back later to assess it with a more confident and experienced outlook. Where even some of the earlier mini-games and self-contained activities in Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie relied on extreme time and difficulty pressures, Yooka-Laylee made up for it simply by making them more vague, awkward and obtuse.
Since Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie were originally cut from the same cloth, they share similar pretensions to connective elements between individual worlds. There are a few challenges that can’t be fully completed without first fulfilling some condition in another nearby location, or an entirely different world beforehand. The distance between these thinly-connected areas is often very long-winded, with only a few of them offering an easily accessible way to directly travel between such locations quickly and efficiently. This problem only applies to a minor number of puzzles in the first game, but it applies to at least a third of them in the sequel, as players will find multiple times that for whatever reason, they don’t currently possess what is needed to solve a puzzle in the moment, and will be forced to wait for the solution to suddenly present itself in a later area and then travel all the way across the world and back through vast maze-like areas, criss-crossing through teleporter pads and unskippable animated scenes just to make all the dominoes fall into place properly. Most of the time, if the player needs to swap between different transformations or playable characters to make basic interactions, they can’t always swap back and forth at a moment’s notice, which means even more backtracking and even more chances of losing the train of logic that brought them to where they were going in the first place.
As individual worlds and areas became larger and more spread out from Banjo-Kazooie to Banjo-Tooie and eventually Yooka-Laylee, the large central landmarks started to bleed into the geographical noise and finding ones way could prove much more difficult as a consequence. Oh yeah, and the games never provide a map. Not even the modern Yooka-Laylee gives players a map. The only entry that actually does do so is Nuts & Bolts and that game’s worlds are the easiest to navigate by far even without a map. You want to know where in the world you are while playing this game in an age of internet connections no faster than dial-up? You gotta buy a magazine for that.
Nuts & Bolts’ approach to minimising the relative tedium of retracing one’s steps is what the vehicle building system was partially intended to resolve, with some late-game upgrades and abilities allowing players to rocket all the way from one far end of each relatively basic world to the other in less than half a minute. Would designers for a new Banjo game want to include a more stripped-down, less customisable mode of transportation to stop the explorative platforming mechanics from being overshadowed this time? Would there be a way to do so while making them relevant to the established gameplay systems without turning the entire game into a Grand Theft Auto contemporary, the way that other mascot platformers like Jak and Daxter or Ty the Tasmanian Tiger did just to try and stay relevant in the mid-2000s? Super Mario Odyssey managed to do both and still included an instant-teleportation fast travel system anyway, so would one even need to consider this at all? The reason why the original Banjo-Kazooie game mostly still gets away with it is because the worlds were far more condensed with smaller locations clustered and oriented around a much more well-defined central landmark or “weenie” in Disneyland-speak.
This means that players could move the camera into Banjo’s perspective, look immediately towards whatever big thing was in the middle of the map and instantly know what area they were in based on which side they were situated at. Similarly, players could tell how high up Grunty’s tower they were by looking around and seeing which distinct biome had dominated the walls, floor and ceiling on the current floor, before updating their mental map accordingly. The lair itself is composed in an illogical manner, much bigger on the inside than it is outside with the different floors seemingly stacked on top of each-other years after the fact. It gets around this with sheer visual variety: entire biomes and time periods are contained in each floor while interiors give way to exteriors and back again, elements of the various themed worlds bleeding from their entrances out into the rest of the hub area as though there’s some strange magic that’s barely struggling to contain them. It’s difficult to get lost, because to reach the witch, there’s usually no other way to go but up. With each world conquered and each toll of musical notes that’s passed, the player would get closer and closer to the peak where the final confrontation awaits, contributing to a long, drawn-out sense of build-up and anticipation.
Even so though, a map would still be absolutely mandated for a new game along with objective notes and general in-game reminders by virtue of the great leaps forward in accessibility standards today. Remember: just because fans didn’t have a hard time after years and years of practice doesn’t mean that say, new players with attention deficit or memory problems won’t have a problem as well. Backtracking as a concept though, isn’t necessarily the issue here (even if you think it is) and neither is the worlds larger sizes in Banjo-Tooie.
Rather, it’s the lack of agency and aid that players are given in navigating those worlds that I believe proves to be the real issue here. Even if the solution doesn’t involve a quick-fix menu-based instant warp system, then some more uniquely discernable landmarks to centre oneself around and more alternative backtracking routes along with more ways for players to bridge the gap between points A and B would help out a lot. It could dull the tedium, cut down on travel-time and engage players further with the world by letting them decide which routes they want to take and what else they would like to do on their way there. As it stands, Banjo-Tooie’s worlds aren’t quite as involved or interconnected as Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night where the lines between biomes and locked-off areas are dynamically broken down considerably over time. Would another new game in the series be willing to take that extra step into becoming even more open? Grunty Industries, which was Banjo-Tooie’s sixth world was deeply polarising for fans considering how far it deviated from the expected design of the first few worlds before it. Since those other worlds were mostly carried over as reserves from the game’s more insular and compactly designed predecessor, they weren’t fully re-evaluated with this approach in mind, with choice elements of interconnectedness instead plastered over the top of what was already there. Would a new game even go as far as to provide some opportunities for players to deviate from, or even skip over entire sequences of linear events?
Embracing backtracking from the start and applying it across the whole game while designing the rest of the experience with this new level design focus firmly in mind could also work wonders if it’s done in such a way that the undeniably important exploration and player-directed curiosity isn’t mitigated by all-too-convenient shortcuts. Backtracking in itself can also be easily framed as the struggle that makes the fruits of ones efforts all the sweeter. Indeed, it already has been; hidden in every world of the first Banjo-Kazooie game is one special button with Grunty’s face on the front. Slamming down on the button would play a quick scene showing a golden Jiggy being made accessible in the witches lair somewhere close to the entrance of the world currently being explored. These cutscenes would last no more than five seconds before cutting back to the player’s position, typically framed in such a way as to obscure all but the most basic central details. The player would still be expected to know where that Jiggy was, considering they had been there at least once already and it always sported some unique identifying feature shown prominently in the cutscene that they could refer back to for clarity.
By communicating so much in such a short time frame, my mind would start racing with excitement, I would get to feel clever for recognising that one spot I remembered seeing before, and thus would begin the long walk back to the world entrance, the journey serving as something of a climax to me collecting my reward. Banjo-Kazooie’s sweeping design decisions from the “weenie” structure world layout to the backtracking, logic-based puzzle ruminations and repeated reminders from certain characters to “come back later,” means that tests of memory is probably the most greatly emphasised challenge in any of these games. This is evidenced with the way in which every game ends: with a contrived penultimate quiz show that tests the player on everything they have experienced right before they jump into the final battle.
Each endgame quiz was a collection of questions testing knowledge about the game as a whole. Get a question right and the player can move forward. Get to the end to win. Get a question wrong and they lose a hit point. Lose all the hit points and they lose a life and are forced to restart the quiz all over again from the beginning. Each random question would force players to refer back to things like character dialogue, character information, location details, sound references and in the case of Yooka-Laylee, going a bit too far with questions regarding negligible inventory stats, easily dismissed minor gameplay events and various other moments that arguably weren’t fully established enough beforehand. It’s not as though new players were to know what they ought to be memorising during their first attempt at any of these games quizzes, but since they would be travelling and backtracking across much of the same areas, talking to the same characters and seeing the same things over and over, those details were far more likely to get seared into a player’s memory than exactly how many hours they’ve been playing until now. No really, that’s an actual question in Yooka-Laylee’s quiz. Also I lied; Yooka-Laylee actually has three quizzes spread throughout the whole game. But at least it lets players skip the next question if they answer one quickly enough.
Needless to say, fans are split to this day over the merits of the end-game quiz show idea in general, even though the Banjo-Kazooie series is very clearly interested in testing long term player memory. Not only did the first game also feature a non-linear board game-like maze full of distinct question categories including timed mini-game repeats and sudden death spaces wherein one wrong answer resulted in…well, sudden death, but it also featured by far and away the most contentious category in the whole series. Because it turns out there was at least one thing players were expected to know absolutely everything about during Gruntilda’s quiz, and that was Gruntilda herself.
Hiding in her lair is Brentilda the Good Witch. With every location she appeared in, she’d let the player know three facts apiece about her vile sister so the bear and bird could use that information to save themselves from a “fiery fate”. Before players arrived to take on Grunty herself, Brentilda’s disgusting facts would all seem like shallow and irrelevant gossip, but these facts would all be tested in their own category when the quiz rolled around. What’s worse is that all the facts were randomised each time the player started a new game, forcing them to memorise the answers all over again each time and take physical notes, because these Grunty fact questions could also show up in the sudden death spaces as well.
Given how so much was demanded of the player in just this portion of the game alone perhaps explains why it was paired back from the first game and presumably why, perhaps for the sake of not straining a player’s complete experiential memory more than it was already, Yooka-Laylee decided on the approach of dividing its quiz segments and distributing them throughout the game. Just as with the ever-expanding world design, this could prove to be a problem for those with short term memory conditions, especially when they don’t have an easy way to refer back to information before diving head first into the quiz. Would a new game save the quiz as a bonus to be played some time after the final battle instead? Should it ditch the quiz concept entirely and instead, go even more sparse than Yooka-Laylee by carefully sprinkling individual tests of memory throughout certain areas of each world as opposed to having all the memory tests lumped in right at the end? Say for example, on one of many return journeys to a certain area, the music cuts out abruptly and a character suddenly rushes over and asks which music was just being played so they can turn it back on. That kind of example wouldn’t even be out of place in the logic of Banjo-Kazooie’s universe. Not by a longshot.
Throughout the entire Banjo-Kazooie series, in spite of the mounting stakes and perilous battles, multiple characters make explicitly clear the fact that they know they are in a video game. Though not directly acknowledging their roles as avatars for the player to inhabit, they nonetheless take to regarding the fourth wall with a knowing smirk, maybe even blowing a few raspberries at it too. A new Banjo-Kazooie game would undoubtedly boast a lot of blunt, irreverent meta-humour along with much of the general elements of parody spread out elsewhere. The first game presented itself with a very Cosgrove Hall twist on well-worn Disney-drenched fairy tale tropes. The good guys are two bears living in a cottage together with a sassy sidekick, a humble short-sighted mole right out of The Wind in the Willows, all in the idyllic farmland gulf of Spiral Mountain where almost everything is adorned with googly eyes. The bad guy is a cauldron-brewing witch who speaks almost entirely in a loosely rhyming incantation-like verses, inspired partly by The Wizard of Oz and partly by ITV’s Grotbags character from the 1980s, with the same character impetus as the evil queen from Snow White.
Even this early on, some quintessentially “British” twists are already being applied. Dialogue from the main characters are drenched with casual slang and idioms with sly remarks and indignant protests all around. The witches verses barely resemble the “mirror mirror” speech from Snow White, only now with some dirty-minded alterations reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. The method for stealing the beauty from Banjo’s sister involves her Frankenstein-worthy assistant Klungo creating a replica of the transferral pods from David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly.
From there, the fairy tale references are diluted into a series of episodic, almost non-linear multi-staged mini-stories that involve exploring stereotypically-themed worlds and meeting various, sometimes recurring characters therein with problems in need of addressing or puzzling situations to be solved and overcome, often applying liberal use of the rule of three in the process. A decent number of these plights are framed in the context of Grunty imposing her dominance in some way, so that every helping hand lent should feel like a small victory against the witch herself. Her presence is felt everywhere as she, the all-seeing eye, casually remarks on the player’s activities, mocking them, berating them and boasting gleefully as they stumble head-long into dangers that she implicitly arranged just for them. These concepts are exemplified with the Jinjos, a race of multicoloured birds imprisoned in each of the worlds that Banjo and Kazooie will visit because according to the instruction booklet, the witch couldn’t stand how happy and twee they were. Freeing every Jinjo in one world will reward the player with a Jiggy and eventually, Grunty is done in by the giant Jinjonator, freed from an ancient stone statue prison by Banjo, Kazooie and the now liberated Jinjos all working together.
Each location and interaction is brought to bouncing life with the quirky, tritone-laden “oompah” music of Grant Kirkhope, based mostly in major and minor C. Every character, be they animal or magic object with googly eyes, talks all the while in a “mumble” language similar to The Clangers, Sooty and Sweep or any other character on a Cbeebies TV show, with text bubbles translating everyone’s repetitive grunts and squeaks in real-time, getting across not only dialogue, but also character in the process. This serves to connect players with the world more directly as these distinct personalities kindly and conveniently explain their own function and reason for being, far more effectively than a dull text box or separate narration voice would have managed by itself. Despite the implications of consumable health items also getting a voice, it managed to be so endearing that it’s a wonder why this technique is never used again outside of Yooka-Laylee, allowing instead for tertiary side-characters do all the bland explaining for them, sometimes before they’re given a proper formal introduction in the story itself. Even so, would people find these voices annoying? Would there be calls to tone them back so they were less awkward and obnoxious to listen to? Would an option for full voice acting be made available alongside it like the more recent versions of Rayman 2? Plenty of games like Undertale still boast similar mumble speak, so should this even be a concern at all?
If a new Banjo-Kazooie game were to settle on a tone though, it would also have to take into account the sometimes abrupt emotional shifts taken with each of the sequels, if it were to create a unifying thread that fits with the world that’s been established already. If the first N64 game took the spray paint to old-fashioned fairy tale set ups akin to the pre-Cinderella Disney classics, then the sequel Banjo-Tooie arguably slathers it over the more “Grimm” Disney dark age films such as The Fox and The Hound or The Black Cauldron, aiming for a much more grimy style of black comedy.
The sequel kicks things off on a rainy evening with Banjo, Kazooie, Mumbo Jumbo and Bottles the Mole all playing poker while Gruntilda’s sisters emerge from a giant drilling machine to excavate her still living skeleton body from under the rock that flattened her at the end of the previous game. Where the first game’s story was driven by an adventurous rescue narrative, Grunty makes her presence felt in this sequel by outright killing Bottles and turning him into a ghost before flooding the now ruined Spiral Mountain with monsters and minions. As she escapes to drain life essence from the top of a new evil fortress off in the Isle O’ Hags, the survivors declare revenge and set off after her. This is not to say that things get too serious; it’s hardly The Dark Knight Returns. Bottles isn’t removed from the narrative completely and is restored right at the end, along with everything else that had their life drained throughout the course of the story. While much of the original game’s wackiness is retained, such as both main character’s roles of the travelling agony-aunt double-act, the game still manages to go to some darkly humorous places, especially when the bear and bird try awkwardly to dance around the question of death in conversation and also bear witness to more than a few deaths themselves.
It’s obvious that Banjo-Tooie aspires to tell a larger, more fleshed-out story with longer cutscenes, grander stakes and a more grounded sense of place than the first game, going so far as to create a somewhat consistent sense of geography between locations relative to the main character’s homeland, now shown to be just one part of a whole island. The desire for more plot setup, more in-depth motivations and a more extraneous cast with greater machinations woven between them is born from the same kitchen sink mentality that drives the new gameplay additions. Many fans clearly enjoyed the promise of seeing old elements being expanded upon and growing out as they grew older, just as any other fan of today’s shared serialised universe stories similarly would. But it’s unclear if Banjo-Tooie wants to earnestly embrace that or use it as an excuse to make some more fun jokes the way it does with almost everything else. Rather than fully commit to either a more vast and epic world of consequence and lore like Rayman 2 and even Crash Bandicoot 3, or stick with the fire-and-forget fantastical nonsense of the first game, there instead exists an awkward blend of both, a problem partially shared with Yooka-Laylee as well.
New characters are introduced with a great air of implied importance, but rather than build on what came beforehand, they seem to be rewriting the rules a little bit. The Jinjonator is nowhere to be seen and in his place is the more laid back King Jingaling of Jinjo Village who is turned into a zombie all too quickly after meeting with the main characters. Master Jiggywiggy also appears as the custodian of the vaguely magical Crystal Jiggy, bestowing a “chosen one” moniker on the bear and bird that never seems to pay off with nary a significant info-dump “lore” moment or even any kind of humorous punchline. Though Grunty retains her pervasive presence from before, her rhyming couplets are gone and what remains doesn’t carry so much a sense of gleeful menace as dull resignation as she introduces the rules of a side-activity or flatly explains the qualities of certain areas about to be visited. Banjo’s sister Tooty is also notably absent for the rest of the entire series from here on out, but would a new game re-introduce her in some capacity, not as a damsel in distress, but perhaps as a character to aid gameplay? Would the story and setting of a new game necessarily need to make similar moves towards a vague notion of “maturity” when that notion would easily sail right over everyone’s fourth-wall-breaking minds anyway?
With Nuts & Bolts, the meta humour goes even further as the very machinations that brought gaming into being in the form of the god-like L.O.G. (the Lord of Games) came crashing headlong into Spiral Mountain, demanding the decades-long territorial feud of Banjo and Kazooie versus Gruntilda be settled in a more decisive and “civilised” manner. To this end, L.O.G. transports the bickering group into a completely foreign cityscape to square off in more arena-like, explicitly artificial worlds, made by L.O.G. himself. Where Banjo-Tooie’s worlds were more definitively grounded and its predecessor’s occupied a grey area between real and magical, the worlds in Nuts & Bolts are all constructed from pieces of wood, fabric, metal, wires, circuitry and holograms. The first world alone boasts images of a cloudy sky literally being displayed on giant flat television screens stretched all around the world boundaries akin to The Truman Show. The fourth wall humour is now significantly more cynical, directing ire towards the corporate side that forced new gameplay changes on their beloved series for the sake of broader modern appeal while simultaneously calling the future of their own franchise into question despite, or even because of such changes. At the same time, it’s clearly trying desperately to cram in as many iconic characters, images and sounds from the originals as it possibly can as if their presence alone would be enough to remind fans that they are in fact playing a Banjo-Kazooie game. Because there’s very little else left behind that could ever hope to suggest this by itself.
Clearly this is reflective of the growing pains experienced by the studio of Rare itself in a larger, more expansion-driven, obligation-dependent corporate landscape that most of the Twycross company’s titles couldn’t really stand up to outside of their former partnership with Nintendo. It’s fair to say then, that the fairy-tale messing roots of the first game have now been eroded away to the point of being unrecognisable, and that’s without mentioning the zany “let’s go back to destroy the past” time-travel plot that occurs with the Game Boy Advance side-story Grunty’s Revenge. The gradual intrusion of janky D.I.Y. technology over whimsical storybook lands could be seen as the closest thing to an accompanying visual theme as these games could probably ever get, something that is very much literalised in Yooka-Laylee with its business-tycoon villain pillaging physical storybook worlds for the pages of a magical tome that when reassembled, could allow him to rewrite all of existence.
On which end of this spectrum would a new Banjo-Kazooie game place itself? Would new motifs be introduced to reflect the characters and the worlds they inhabit and how would this be informed by what has been tried before? Would a new game try and retain the fun-filled wackiness of the first game, or would it go even more snide and cynical than either Banjo-Tooie or Nuts & Bolts ever did? Would change be a factor at all considering how everyone is aware of their existence as mere constructions of a video game world where consequence is rarely dwelled upon? How much ought to be changed and how much should be brought back? Some fans are obsessed with the idea of returning to Grunty’s lair and finding some hitherto unexplored region hidden away from everything else they’d seen before, eager to see more contrived details in places that had already been fleshed out to their fullest as opposed to reaching out into unexplored territory. Would it be worth it for a writer or narrative designer to expand and call back on everything that was established in previous games in the name of continuity when the series has proved itself so impermanent and unconcerned with things like consistency, logic, canon and lore? On the other hand, if writers were to throw almost everything out of the window, what would they replace it with? Would anyone take kindly to another change in scenery after last time?
(sigh…)
Ironically, the more logic one tries to incorporate into a universe like Banjo-Kazooie’s, the less sense it actually ends up making when taken as a whole. There doesn’t seem to be a wrong direction to take the Banjo-Kazooie series, but none of it actually ends up feeling right either. The first game as it was released, made its intentions clear as a derivative to Super Mario 64 with its own perspective on how the genre could be explored and it did everything it needed to with the two games that were made. There are individual ideas and concepts that I’ve explored here (and more than a few left-field ones that I’m keeping to myself), but they are entirely dependent on the game being made around it and they aren’t nearly malleable enough to change with them. Take too much away and it ceases to be itself. Change too little and it won’t accomplish anything that its forbears haven’t already done better before. A new Banjo-Kazooie game that was actually designed as a regularly iterative series likely wouldn’t even look like Banjo-Kazooie as we know it. Even if I myself were to find a way to take all of the disparate elements I’ve been brainstorming throughout and make them fit together so they informed and complimented each-other while also reflecting and aiding the story that was being attempted, we would likely be left with a game too big and too involved to be worth the trouble from a financial perspective. If a company were to take every single piece of fan feedback on board, they would inevitably arrive at too many points of contention and in trying to please everyone at once, would probably end up with something even worse than that. To paraphrase The Simpsons: we’d have a realistic down-to-earth game that’s also totally off the wall and filled with flying robots.
This is what everybody says they want. I do too and you do too. If you say you don’t, then you’re only lying to yourself. This is how the ruthless capitalist machine is designed to work and this is how it wants us to think and behave so it can keep on working. But does the world of Banjo-Kazooie necessarily need to be an ongoing franchise? Can it even manage to be a recurring franchise? The gameplay formulas of Crash Bandicoot and Spyro couldn’t expand upon themselves meaningfully enough before developers saw fit to re-contextualise them with all new mechanics that completely changed what they were. Even after they were revived with new games and even a follow up for Crash Bandicoot, people have no idea if they’ll keep going. Is there really much of a way to iterate upon them? When would be the right time to let the bear and bird hibernate in their cottage home of Spiral Mountain? Every Banjo-Kazooie game is a hodge-podge of ideas and they’re all the more endearing for it, but the series as it stands sadly doesn’t make for something that can be regularly built upon and experimented with in anything close to a timely, let alone regular fashion. But even if only one new game were announced tomorrow and it turned out to be a hit, should it be planned with a complete ending in mind, or should it be left open with yet another sequel hook if it performs well enough to warrant one?
NO! OF COURSE NOT! BECAUSE THEN, WE’D JUST BE RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED!
What happens after that new game? Do they make another one again? Would any game be received well enough for fans to embrace them? If the fanbase wasn’t big enough to support it, would it find an audience somewhere else? Would either outcome warrant yet another sequel on top of it? A spin-off? A reboot? A re-imagining? Where else could that sequel possibly go next? These are the kinds of questions and variables faced by every game that gets released, and not just those in the mainstream AAA sector either. This is a market that we all consciously contribute to no matter where we choose to “vote with our wallets” and it’s an area that Banjo-Kazooie probably isn’t big enough to cut it’s teeth with nowadays. Even if Rare did overcome their apathy for a new Banjo-Kazooie game and make one anyway, I’d argue that they’re much too afraid to do so, having effectively written themselves into a creative corner and like Radiohead post OK-Computer, now too afraid of their own success to try and write themselves out of it again. Besides, they’ve already reinvented themselves so profoundly for Sea of Thieves and Everwild. They’ve done so to such success that there’s no way that the now two hundred employee-packed studio could make a new game in nearly the same way that 15 people in a farm house managed back in the mid-1990s.
The option to license out the franchise to another studio does exist, as evidenced already with games like Killer Instinct, Battletoads and Perfect Dark so far. But how then, if such a studio were to willingly volunteer, would they be able to navigate the prospect of releasing a new Banjo-Kazooie game that could attract newcomers without also angering a sizeable portion of the established fanbase? How would they keep it going? Would they really want to be stuck with it year after year? What if Grant Kirkhope couldn’t return to make the music for every single game? His work with the series has become nigh-inseparable from the franchise now. What if he wanted to do something else instead? What if he became ill or worse? When fans go this long without getting what they ask from the machine, even if their little show-pony has long-since run its course, they fill in the blanks with their own Metroid 2 Game Boy remakes or a missing trilogy-rounding sequel to Alice In Wonderland or a warts-and-all spiritual successor to Sonic Adventure or a realistically-textured update of both Banjo-Kazooie games from the Nintendo 64, seamlessly packaged together into one cohesive experience with mismatched realistic textures pasted over classic models released to a fanbase that will be more excited for what it represents than what it actually is.
Let’s face this harsh prospect head-on: short of Microsoft letting Rare back into the wild or the company imploding and selling off their IP, I don’t see any reason for these companies to stop milking the nostalgic merchandise cow; a far safer and less costly alternative as far as they are concerned. This is why I think it’s also just as possible that we may never see a new Banjo-Kazooie game again. But this is not a matter of “if we will”. My question was, do we really need another Banjo-Kazooie game? I know you don’t want to hear this, and it pains me to say is as a fan myself too. Do I want a new game? Oh do I ever! I’d give anything to make one myself! It would be a nice thing to have, but “want” and “need” are not the same thing. After all I’ve managed to gleam from pondering, hypothesising and analysing everything that we have, not only do I not think that we need a new Banjo-Kazooie game, I also think that in defiance of our “want”, we shouldn’t have a new Banjo-Kazooie game.
Not now, not ever.
I’m not saying we somehow “don’t deserve” a sequel or that we didn’t “deserve” to have Banjo and Kazooie appear in Smash Bros after years of requests. “Deserving” something just for being a fan, waiting a very long time and asking really nicely like a good little customer is neither here nor there. When developers and creatives of a really large company say they’re doing something “for the fans”, they rarely actually mean it genuinely, if ever at all. We didn’t do anything to deserve it and we didn’t do anything to not deserve it! All you and I ever do is buy some things and wait for some more things! Our devotion to The Machine just keeps us from broadening our horizons and blinds us to everything we already have right in front of us. I try to imagine a world where Banjo-Kazooie was never split up into two games and never made it onto the Gamecube or the Xbox or any platform at all, slipping away into cancellation and quiet obscurity only to be gawked at on history blogs in blurred screenshots. I also try to imagine a world in which Dreams: Land of Giants was released for the Nintendo 64 instead of either bear or bird.
I try to imagine a world where Activision had won the bid to buy Rare instead of Microsoft (because they very nearly almost did), a world where Banjo-Kazooie ended up circling the drain, trying and failing to chase lucrative formulas just like Crash and Spyro did, only now under even worse working conditions. If they weren’t shut down and disbanded, they be sent down to the Call of Duty mines alongside Beenox, Toys for Bob and Raven Software while all of that IP sat around gathering dust. I try to imagine, if they did somehow survive, what kind of condition they would be in now when Microsoft made that ridiculous bid to buy Activision itself wholesale. I try to imagine a world where Nintendo exercised a little more faith in its teams of western developers and gave Rare a home for its games on the Nintendo Gamecube. Would their efforts be freed or limited by Nintendo’s less powerful hardware and would it have more negatively affected an attempt at a possible sequel? I also think of a world in which Rare never got noticed by Nintendo at all, continuing to make licensed tat for LJN based on Roger Rabbit, Spider-Man, Beetlejuice and Wrestlemania, only ever known for their former glory on the ZX Spectrum before fading into obscurity with the last game of any noteworthy ambition they ever made being a tarot-reading fortune teller program called Taboo: The Sixth Sense.
Looking back at it all, I would have been grateful enough to have just one Banjo-Kazooie game exist in my lifetime. What’s better now is that we aren’t in danger of losing out on those classic experiences either, because unlike the Spyro or Crash trilogies on their original hardware, they aren’t so inaccessible to modern audiences to warrant a reintroduction or even piracy for that matter, which is more than can be said for the likes of Mother 3. That’s why I think it should be okay for more of us to accept that Banjo-Kazooie can end here. In many ways, it’s probably for the best that it does. Not because it’s somehow bad, but because it’s already done all that anyone could ever ask of any game series. The fact that so many of our favourite games or favourite movies or favourite TV shows of all time can manage to exist at all just the way they are, even if for just one instalment or one season, is nothing short of miraculous.
Fans have been anticipating so much when maybe we should start to recognise that we already have everything they need right here. The Banjo-Kazooie series has seen two classic Nintendo releases, two competent spin-offs, a reimagined modern take, more than a few spiritual successors, be they direct or indirect, playable appearances in a racing game and the most beloved cross-over fighting game series of all time. There’s now a burgeoning community of technical artists out there experimenting with the base code of the original game and weaving together their own ideas and creative takes into its classic structure. If you haven’t seen them yet, the new creations courtesy of the Banjo-Kazooie modding community are utterly fantastic and on top of the mods still currently in active development, there’s also a reverse-engineering project for the first game to get it running natively on modern PCs without the need for a classic console emulator. Just like the recent reverse-engineering efforts for Super Mario 64 and Zelda Ocarina of Time, this could open the doors for potentially even more creative ventures yet to come. Even before the modding tools were developed, the series has left behind merchandise for days, artwork and music, flash animations, hand-drawn animations, influences that have rippled all across the industry from the earlier days of open world gaming to the modern throwbacks that are still following its example. If Super Mario Odyssey could arguably be inspired by ideas explored more than a decade-and-a-half before it, that should stand as a testament to the staying power of those ideas.
Banjo-Kazooie doesn’t need to come back. It’s always been here. And it always will be.
(…phew!)
That was a long one. I felt like I had to end on a positive note after all that, just as much for my sake as it was for yours.
So, if you didn’t already know, hi. I’m George Cheal. I wrote a whole bunch of other articles here on Medium if you’d like to take a look at them.
I made a whole bunch of games by myself and with other people, one of which almost got on E4’s GamesMaster reboot (but then kinda didn’t lol). You’ll also see in there a fanfic sourcebook for the video board game Atmosfear that’s (no joke) about 80,000 words long.
Check out a few of my videos (and a Banjo Soundfont x Walten Files mash-up) on the YouTubes, follow me on Twitter if you want to send me your most strongly-worded hate-messages aaaaand…yeah.
Eekum-bokum, I’ll see you in the next one.
Byeeee.