Right around the time Playtonic Games, a new studio made up of former veteran Rare developers, unveiled their spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie, thousands of miles away a new, Rare-approved Banjo-Kazooie game was shown off.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Spotlight
The man who made Conker - Rare's most adult game
From the archive: Chris Seavor on cancelled projects, the good old days and losing his rag.
Ex-Rare devs talk Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark
Starfire Studios recounts Rare's heyday.
Throttled.
The studio head talks about bringing back Banjo.
Key events
22nd December 2008
5th November 2008
5th November 2008
4th September 2008
28th March 2008
12th November 2007
Ex-Rare veterans tease Banjo Kazooie spiritual successor
And found new indie studio, Playtonic Games.
A group of former Rare developers have announced plans for a "spiritual successor" to platforming classic Banjo Kazooie.
Banjo-Kazooie's spiritual successor is no longer happening
"Everyone's got other jobs."
In September 2012 a rag-tag crew of former Banjo-Kazooie developers calling themselves MingyJongo announced that they were working on a spiritual successor to the bear & bird-based N64 platformer series. Unfortunately, that project is no longer in development.
The man who made Conker - Rare's most adult game
From the archive: Chris Seavor on cancelled projects, the good old days and losing his rag.
Every Sunday we present an article from our archive - giving you a chance to discover something for the first time, or maybe just to get reacquainted. This week, with the Conker-starring Project Spark finally releasing, we go back to Wes' interview with the man behind Rare's foul-mouthed mascot.
Retrospective: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Does a bear drive in the woods?
The roots of my appreciation for Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts began long before Rare had created either bear or bird in an inauspicious-yet-somehow-none-too-surprising fashion that outwardly has nothing to do with video games.
Did Microsoft ruin Britain's greatest game studio?
Through a locked gate, down a winding path and by a still pond a few miles outside of the leafy village of Twycross, England, a bonsai tree stands. It was a gift given to Rare by Shigeru Miyamoto, the most famous game designer in the world, as a thank-you for the game developer's critical and commercial success in creating games for Nintendo, the most famous game maker in the world.
Ex-Rare devs talk Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark
Starfire Studios recounts Rare's heyday.
It's a CV packed with best-selling games spread out across a decade: Killer Instinct, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Kameo… we're talking, of course, about Rare.
Rare receives birthday makeover
New logo, "new identity".
Ye olde British developer Rare has had a makeover ahead of its 25th anniversary this summer.
Nuts & Bolts DLC coming in April
Pick up the Lost Challenges for 400 MSP.
Rare plans to beef up Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts on 7th April with the Lord of Games' Lost Challenges pack.
Rare staff facing possible lay-offs
Studio wants to speed up dev cycles.
Rare plans to restructure and possibly downsize in order to refocus on speedy, more simplified development cycles.
Banjo-Tooie XBLA due out in April
Nuts & Bolts user map winners soon.
Rare has announced that Banjo-Tooie will be released on Xbox Live Arcade in April following the release of the original Banjo-Kazooie through the download service late last year.
Banjo patched with SDTV text option
Writing's on the tall.
Rare has reportedly patched Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts so that dialogue boxes and prompts are easier to read on standard-definition TVs.
The latest auto-downloading title update turns on large text by default, according to forumites, and introduces a toggle to the brightness and contrast options menu.
When it launched in late October, Banjo was criticised for its tiny on-screen text, which was difficult to make out on smaller SDTVs, impossible to adjust, and important to making progress.
Rare wants best user vehicles in Banjo
Running competition to find them.
Rare is running a competition to find the best user-created vehicles in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and plans to incorporate them in the game.
Rare will fix Banjo display glitch after all
Fans with SD tellies have feelings too.
Rare has about-turned and decided to fix the problem with text that occurs when Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is played on a standard definition telly.
Rare: Banjo display glitch here to stay
Not enough time or money to fix.
Rare has said that the small text in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is unlikely to be adjusted to work on standard-definition TVs.
Throttled.
Cars, as a rule, don't hop up and down. It's not very good for them or the people inside them. Given the option though, we obviously would put springs on the bottom of ours, so when we stumbled into Banjo-Kazooie's Jiggoseum for the umpteenth time and were asked to join a three-lap checkpoint race of the arena, we were pleased to discover there would be hurdles. Made of bricks. But, alas, our satisfaction was only fleeting, as we turned out to be rubbish at car hurdles, because we only had two springs available at Mumbo Jumbo's garage, and it's rather difficult to balance the up-thrust of a pair of ACME Tigger-tails against the delicate immediacy of jet propulsion. Still, we weren't stumped for long. New solution: snow plough. Bye bye bricks.
This isn't a platform game, then. You can eke out hidden extras on-foot in the hub world, Showdown Town, but this is a driving, flying and boating game, with almost no player death or hairy jumps to worry about. You are collecting 131 jigsaw pieces (jiggies) - in much the same framework as Mario gathering stars - but every task begins by asking you to select or build a vehicle to fit the brief. You're never let loose on foot and then given the choice, and if you were, you wouldn't enjoy it, because the vast, ornately detailed openworld level environments would take several minutes to cross, and their thick bridges, riverbeds, hills, pathways, iceflows and buildings are impractical for platforming. They're either there to absorb your rubber, or look sexy as you deliver coconuts to a supply ship, barge Mr. Patch into a cactus with a biplane, or launch yourself off a ski-jump in a homemade toboggan.
Amidst all this detail, which the game happily displays without trickery or obfuscation - even directing a nod to Crackdown's Agency tower at one point - the frame-rate will dip below the stock 30 from time to time, and some of the load-times are appalling, but the overall effect is decent recompense. The first world, for example, is a charmingly fake and beautiful island of patchwork hills and fields with a tumbledown farm in the middle (it only takes a nudge), Playmobil flora and square cows in the meadows, a smouldering volcano to one side, and massive whirring mechanical gizmos off-shore operating a system of rotating metal rods in the sky, from which stitch-covered clouds are suspended by string. The whole level is surrounded by flickering, scan-line-covered panels of deep blue pretend. It's a very pretty place.
Resistance 2 and Banjo reviews today
2pm and 5pm respectively.
It's that time of year! The big guns are queuing up to fire their fun into your shopping baskets, and after Gears of War 2 on Monday we've got another two reviews today that we thought we'd trail for you.
First up will be Resistance 2. It came out in the US yesterday (as did logic, arguably), and is out here on 28th November. We liked the first one (well, I did), but had significant reservations. Has R2 improved enough to claim a higher score? Find out at 2pm GMT.
Then there's a general embargo for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts reviews at 5pm GMT. We've been quietly excited about this one (apart from when I shouted about it) for a few months, but now it's time to find out whether Rare's decision to wrench the bear and bird out of their platforming comfort zone has been worthwhile. Look out for that at 5pm GMT.
Banjo Nuts & Bolts demo on Xbox Live
Full game almost upon us.
Rare has cobbled together a Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts demo for Xbox Live.
Gears 2 and Banjo at Eurogamer Expo!
Play them early.
Eurogamer is running out of ways to describe its pleasure at announcing things to announce that Gears of War 2 and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts will both be playable at the Eurogamer Expo on 28th and 29th October.
Banjo-Kazooie XBLA gets date, price
Late November for ten quid.
Microsoft plans to release Rare's Nintendo 64 platformer Banjo-Kazooie for Xbox Live Arcade on 26th November. The price: 1200 MS Points (GBP 10.20 / EUR 14.40).
Just two months until release.
Just two months until release.
Another spin through a near-finished build.
With only weeks to go before Rare's venerable Banjo-Kazooie franchise emerges from its decade-long slumber, the game is seriously taking shape. This week, at Microsoft's UK headquarters in Reading, we were able to go hands-on with almost finished (albeit not yet bug-free) code.
UK Banjo pre-orders net XBLA version
Including two-week head-start.
Although it confirmed the Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts release date a couple of weeks ago, Microsoft has now added that UK pre-orders will be rewarded with free access to the Xbox Live Arcade version of Banjo-Kazooie as well.
Exclusive Banjo-Kazooie gameplay vids
Doing it for the skids.
It's 10 years since Rare turned out the original Banjo-Kazooie on N64, in a blummin' marvellous platformer that rivalled Mario 64 in the gameplay stakes while charming us with the Britsoft studio's irresistibly quirky humour.
To make the series relevant to today's discerning gamer, the duo's long-awaited return this November in Nuts & Bolts sees Rare jumping on the user-created content bandwagon, offering a blend of traditional platforming and custom vehicle creation, with a big emphasis on the online community.
We recently visited Rare to take an in-depth look at how the game was shaping up, which you can read all about in our detailed preview , and go further behind the scenes in our Eurogamer TV Special .
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts dated
XBLA release a fortnight later.
Microsoft has announced that Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts will be released in the US on 14th November and confirmed to Eurogamer that it will be out here on the same day.
Banjo demo, Stop 'N' Swop detailed
DLC is also likely.
Rare has confirmed plans to release a Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts demo before the game's release in November, and outlined how the "Stop 'N' Swop" component that links Nuts & Bolts to the Xbox Live Arcade re-release of Banjo-Kazooie will work.
Multiplayer at last! And some new SP stuff.
Multiplayer at last! And some new SP stuff.
We visit Rare and play single-player and multiplayer.
Sadly, we are unable to settle the debate. We may have been invited to Rare to play Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts last week, but we cannot definitively confirm what percentage is platforming and what percentage is racing. Apart from being impossible to quantify, this is because - after several hours of egg-and-spoon races in shopping trolleys and playing darts with soapbox racers and a ski-jump - we don't care. You too will get over it, we suspect, once you've spent a few minutes in the vehicle editor.
The studio head talks about bringing back Banjo.
It's not been an easy few years for Rare. It's a cliché to point it out, of course - you'd be hard-pressed to find an article about Rare in the last few years that doesn't mention its fall from grace following Microsoft's buyout, and we've no doubt that the studio is sick of hearing about it.
Spanner time.
The first thing you need to know about Banjo-Kazooie's expansive E3 demo is the one that's going to get the traditionalists shaking and sputtering with rage: you don't do very much platforming in it. The second thing you need to know, following close on the heels of the first, is that that's fine, because it's still great fun.
No motion control for Banjo Kazooie 3
Rare man dismisses rumours.
Rare told Eurogamer there is no truth to rumours there will be motion control functionality in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.
Gears 2 leads Microsoft E3 charge
Plus Halo Wars finally on show.
Microsoft plans to give us a look at Halo Wars during the upcoming July E3 event, as well as reveal more about headline-grabber Gears of War 2.
Rare: "people are always afraid of change"
But Banjo's genre "needed shaking up".
Banjo-Kazooie creator Gregg Mayles believes the platform-adventure genre "needed shaking up", and that Nuts & Bolts is the game to do it.
MS confirms Banjo and Piñata leaks, promises Gears of War 2 reveals
San Francisco event taking place today.
As we all sit around rubbing hoof-shaped marks out of our foreheads, Microsoft has whipped open the stable doors and explained what's going on at its event in San Francisco - confirming names and details for Banjo-Kazooie and Viva Piñata sequels among other things.
Big news first: Cliff Bleszinski will be on hand in San Francisco to show off "dramatic new gameplay elements" in Gears of War 2 using a "campaign sequence from early in the game - where Marcus Fenix and COG forces engage in pulse-pounding firefights between two Derrick transports, fend off vicious Reaver fly-by attacks and rabid Brumaks" ahead of the game's November release on 360. Ellie is currently checking her pencil batteries and sharpening her dictaphone, so expect her report on all that very soon.
What's more, Too Human developer Silicon Knights has announced that the game will be out in the US on 19th August and in Europe on 29th August, giving us the chance to stab futuristic vikings in the face with inadequately researched contextual comments [very post-modern - Ed].
Banjo-Kazooie 3 named, detailed
Nuts & Bolts is all about the vehicles.
Banjo-Kazooie 3 is to be suffixed Nuts & Bolts and will let you dynamically build vehicles as you collect parts around each level.
Banjo-Kazooie 3 "not a racing game"
Rare responds to leaked shots.
Rare has told Eurogamer that Banjo-Kazooie 3 is not a racing game and that you are better off waiting for its official unveiling tomorrow before jumping to conclusions.
Mechanical mayhem from Rare.
Mechanical mayhem from Rare.
Guess the plot for Banjo-Kazooie 3
Rare presents five rumours, one is true.
Rare has decided to let you guess at the plot in upcoming title Banjo-Kazooie 3.
Banjo-Kazooie 3 confirmed for Xmas
Not just aimed at kids, apparently.
Rare has confirmed that the first Xbox 360 instalment in the Banjo-Kazooie series is on track for a Christmas release.
According to man-in-the-know George Kelion, posting on NeoGaf, "The game is scheduled for a holiday 2008 release - barring the coming of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you should be playing Banjo 3 before the end of the year (providing you buy the game, that is)."
Kelion went on to confirm that Banjo's creator, Gregg Mayles, is lead designer on the game, and sought to calm fears it's going to be one for the kids.
Banjo 3 boasts "unique" multiplayer
Unlike anything out there, apparently.
Rare has said that part of its "new direction" for Banjo-Kazooie 3 will involve introducing a "unique" multiplayer mode unlike anything currently out there.
Plus: Banjo 3 for Xmas?
Microsoft Game Studios boss Shane Kim has confirmed that the Marvel Universe MMO has been canned.
Banjo not cancelled, says Rare
Despite rumour to contrary.
A source at UK developer Rare has told GamesIndustry.biz that its Banjo-Kazooie title for Xbox 360 has not been cancelled, despite rumours to the contrary.
There is speculation that development of a major, first-party Microsoft title has been stopped. But, if true, this is "definitely not" Banjo-Kazooie, says the source at the Microsoft-owned developer.
Rumours have intensified since Shane Bettenhausen, of US magazine EGM, mentioned them on last week's 1up Yours podcast.
Banjo surprise in store - Rare
Lots of work still to be done.
We won't be hearing much about Rare's new Banjo-Kazooie game for a while, says Rare, and when we do we might be surprised at what we do hear.
New world, new tech.
Rare concept artist Ryan Stevenson has been blabbing about Banjo Kazooie for Xbox 360, telling us to expect a whole new world built on new, next-generation technology.
So says top Microsoft exec.
Good news for fans of the N64 originals - a top Microsoft exec has told Eurogamer that the original team responsible for Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie is working on the new 360 instalment announced at last week's X06.