THE EVOLUTION OF BANJO-KAZOOIE

THE FINAL ITERATION OF RARE'S PROJECT DREAM, BANJO-KAZOOIE BECAME A BEST-SELLER THAT RECEIVED MULTIPLE FOLLOW-UPS. BANJO CREATORS CHRIS SUTHERLAND, ED BRYAN, GAVIN HOOD, GARY RICHARDS AND STEVE MALPASS EXPLAIN HOW THE SERIES EVOLVED

- WORDS BY RORY MILNE

During Rare’s Nintendo days, the studio made a habit of producing cutting-edge games on aging hardware. In late-1994, its pre-rendered platformer Donkey Kong Country allowed the sprite-focussed SNES to compete with the polygon-powered PlayStation, however a contemporary project codenamed Project Dream was struggling to find form. It too employed pre-rendered visuals, but was isometric rather than side-on. Dream was an action adventure featuring pirates that was intended to be vast in scale, and it was pushing the SNES even further than Donkey Kong Country. Character designer Ed Bryan joined the Dream team after cutting his teeth at Rare on a coin-op brawler. “I was in the Killer Instinct stable for a little while, after that I moved to a project in the Donkey Kong barn that was called Dream,” Ed recalls. “We were working on the Super NES, but we were using all of this rendered stuff in PowerAnimator on these Silicon Graphics machines. We were trying to make some huge Zelda-like game in 3D with pirates.”

Sometime after Ed started working on the project, it was moved to the N64. Then shortly after finishing Donkey Kong Country 2, coder Chris Sutherland joined Ed on Dream. Chris reflects on some major changes as it went from one iteration to another. “The main character was a boy called Edison, but then it got changed to a bear,” Chris recollects. “There was a top-down 3D environment where you were chased by Trolls, then we looked at doing something more like Donkey Kong Country but in 3D, and after that we went more to a fixed side-on camera. We were then shown what the Conker team was doing. It had managed to get very high-quality polygonal backgrounds, and so we took that approach as well. That was when we started Banjo-Kazooie, as it was to become later on.”

The name