Banjo-Kazooie, the iconic bird and bear duo who first stomped onto the scene in two excellent N64 platformers, almost looked very different.
The story of how Banjo-Kazooie actually began development as Project Dream has been well documented up to now. Before Banjo-Kazooie was a platformer about collecting jiggies and defeating a green witch, it was a pirate adventure where Banjo was actually a human.
But in the latest issue of Retro Gamer, former Rare artist and character designer Ed Bryan revealed that, for a week or so, Banjo was a rabbit, of all things. “We went from a boy to a rabbit for about a week [before a bear],” he said. “The story is that I’m pissed off because Banjo should have been a rabbit, but he clearly should never have been!”
While clips of Project Dream have surfaced in the decades since, we’ve never actually seen what rabbit Banjo looked like, as far as I’m aware. But that footage does exist somewhere. “I’ve got old DAT tapes that I used to back up my work, and I sent a couple of them to be archived,” Bryan continued. “Pretty much everything on them was recovered, and I found the rabbit. I’ve only shared him with Kaan Serin Steve Mayles because the internet would go bananas.”
The other half of Banjo-Kazooie is, well, Kazooie, the sarcastic red bird who lives in Banjo’s backpack and slyly bullies him throughout the entire game. The idea for her came up because the team “felt there should be a reason for the double jump and someone said there could be wings that could come out of Banjo’s backpack,” former developer Chris Sutherland recalled. “Then the extension to that was why not just have another character that had wings.”
GoldenEye 007 had a “strong influence” on Banjo-Kazooie’s sequel because Rare devs spent “probably every lunchtime for a couple of years” playing the N64 FPS
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