Banjo-Kazooie, one of the most beloved 3D platformers released during the 90s, and arguably one of developer Rare’s most beloved games that isn’t the Donkey Kong Country trilogy on the Super Nintendo. But what most people don’t know is that the game started out as a top down role-playing game on the Super Nintendo, footage of which seems to have been lost to the ether of time. Until now that is, as Rare has been digging up some of their older projects and discussing them in an interesting video series, with their latest video discussing this forgotten prototype.
In the video, which you can check out below, some member of the staff discuss this early project about a boy and a dog going on an adventure, and went by the name Dream. Eventually however, the team realized that this wouldn’t work, so they went with a more cartoony style that would later be used in Banjo-Kazooie. It then changed again when the team saw Super Mario 64 in action, and decided to make the game a 3D platformer, with the main character being a bear named Banjo (who in the original concept was a rabbit), and a few years later we got the game we now know as Banjo-Kazooie.
Banjo-Kazooie is a part of the Rare Replay collection, which is available now exclsuively for the Xbox One. I think we can all agree that while it may have taken a few tries, the game that Rare ultimately came up with worked out in the end.
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