We all love a walk down memory lane and where else to take that but the games we grew up with? Banjo Kazooie hit the Nintendo 64 in 1998 and has been beloved ever since! How much do you know about this Rare game? Well, let’s find out!
1. Banjo Kazooie was actually the biggest and fastest selling game of 1998, being incredibly well received by critics and boosted by a really heavy marketing campaign.
2. It was memory restrictions that kept the voices in the game from being spoken dialogue. That’s why you hear voice-adjacent effects but not full voices!
3. There are nine ways to enter the Mad Monster Mansion, despite people typically only utilizing three in their games.
(Nintendo, Rare)
4. Quite a few connected moments were exchanged between this game and Donkey Kong 64, such as the Fungus Forest being written and designed for Banjo Kazooie, but ultimately being taken out and utilized in Donkey Kong 64 instead.
5. Only the Crocodile transformation attacks, while the others have a multitude of uses — Crocodile is the most useful for most as it allows you to attack while transformed.
6. Originally, the race level with Boggy the Bear had 74 slalom gates to push through but in order to cut down on memory, they went down by over half to make sure it wasn’t too long, frustrating and they could free more memory up for the level.
(Nintendo, Rare)
7. Speaking of Boggy, his kids are named Soggy, Moggy and Groggy. Clever. Just name your kids similarly to yours! You’ll always remember.
8. In the manual to the game, it lets you know there is an option to just exit the Witches Lair, however the final game did not have this feature. In fact, it was dropped during the beta but the books were already printed.
9. Clanker was originally meant to be a real whale but was turned mechanical so as to avoid complications with design and to twist around the story without the audience taking pity on an actual whale rather than a mechanical one.
(Nintendo, Rare)
10. In the beta version, you know the one with the exit from the Witches Lair, there was a framed picture of Donkey Kong at Banjo’s bedside. In the final version, they decided to put Tootie there instead.
