Rare (FKA Rareware) has been a gaming institution for almost 40 years and has put out well over 100 games, so it’s no surprise that at some point in its history, the developer would eventually take inspiration from itself. And that’s exactly what happened during the development of Banjo-Tooie (the Banjo-Kazooie sequel, naturally), which actually has some GoldenEye 007 influence, of all things.
Former Rare developer and Banjo-Tooie coder Chris Sutherland said as much in the latest issue of the Retro Gamer magazine while talking about the making of the 2000 sequel.
You see, Banjo-Tooie featured a handful of sections where you’d see the world from Banjo’s eye while he, urm, grabbed Kazooie by the neck and used her to shoot out eggs like an anthropomorphic machine gun. Some of the game’s multiplayer mini-games worked the same way, too, but that’s only because a handful of developers were basically hooked on the N64’s GoldenEye, also made by Rare.
“There were four or five of us on the Banjo team that would play GoldenEye, probably every lunchtime for a couple years, so that was a strong influences on Banjo-Tooie,” Sutherland said. “Then I think [director] Gregg Mayles always wanted to have Banjo and Kazooie separate and then join up. It just felt like the next logical step. Once we split the characters apart suddenly your moveset was reduced, so you couldn’t do all the things you could do before. It was another way to give you a different set of moves. Then there were missions built around that.”
Rare’s always had a knack for swapping genres like a pair of socks, and the studio returned to shooters with Perfect Dark, Perfect Dark Zero, and the first-person perspective in Sea of Thieves. As for Banjo-Kazooie, the company’s reportedly still listening to pitches about a possible reboot.
We could’ve gotten a Banjo Kazooie cartoon in the ’00s, but Xbox was breaking fans’ hearts even then: “Microsoft did not see this as something that they wanted to invest in”
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