Banjo-Kazooie is a 1998 platform game developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. Controlling the player characters, the bear Banjo and the bird Kazooie, the player attempts to save Banjo's kidnapped sister Tooty from the witch Gruntilda. The player explores nine nonlinear worlds to gather items and progress. Using Banjo and Kazooie's traversal and combat abilities, they complete challenges such as solving puzzles, jumping over obstacles, and defeating bosses.
Rare conceived Banjo-Kazooie as a role-playing video game, Dream, for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System following the completion of Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (1995). The 15-member team, led by Gregg Mayles, transitioned development to the Nintendo 64 and retooled the game as a platformer after the role-playing format proved too complex. Banjo-Kazooie was inspired by Super Mario 64 (1996) and designed to appeal to a broad audience, similar to Disney films. Grant Kirkhope composed the soundtrack; Banjo-Kazooie was one of the first games to feature vertical remixing, where various sound layers fade in and out depending on the player's location.
Released in North America in late June 1998 and in Europe the following month, Banjo-Kazooie sold over three million copies, making it one of the bestselling Nintendo 64 games. It received acclaim from critics, who said it surpassed Super Mario 64 as the best 3D platform and adventure game. The game was praised for its visuals, soundtrack, characters, writing, humour, and level design, while criticism was directed towards lack of originality and the camera system. Banjo-Kazooie received numerous year-end accolades, including two from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences: "Console Action Game of the Year" and "Outstanding Achievement in Art/Graphics".
In retrospect, Banjo-Kazooie has been cited as one of the greatest video games ever made. It spawned a series which includes two sequels, Banjo-Tooie (2000) and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (2008), and two spin-offs, Grunty's Revenge (2003) and Banjo-Pilot (2005). Following Microsoft's 2002 acquisition of Rare, 4J Studios developed a port for the Xbox 360 in 2008, later included in the Xbox One compilation Rare Replay in 2015. It was released on the Nintendo Switch via the Nintendo Classics service in 2022, marking its first rerelease on a Nintendo console.
Gameplay
thumb|left|Screenshot of the first world in the game, Mumbo's Mountain. Collecting musical notes grants the player access to new areas of the game's [[overworld.]]
Banjo-Kazooie is a single-player platform game in which the player controls the titular protagonists, an easy-going brown honey bear named Banjo and a troublemaking female red-crested "Breegull" Kazooie, from a third-person perspective. The game features nine three-dimensional worlds where the player must gather musical notes and jigsaw puzzle pieces, called Jiggies, to progress. The door with the highest amount of required notes has 880, although 765 are needed to enter the final section. It is also possible to complete certain worlds out of order, assuming the player has enough Jiggies and musical notes to reach a world earlier than intended.
Banjo and Kazooie are also aided by Gruntilda's sister, Brentilda, who provides information about the witch needed to defeat her, and Mumbo Jumbo, a shaman who used to be Gruntilda's teacher. As development progressed, the boy was considered by the developers to be generic; thus he was replaced by a rabbit for "two or three days," then a bear who wore a backpack, trainers and cap. Similarly to the barrels in Donkey Kong Country, Banjo would have used balls from a variety of sports, such as a football, baseball, American football, bowling ball, basketball, and a water-filled balloon, that could be powered up by a balloon inflator, football boot, football helmet and baseball glove. The enemy parts and hub map were also taken from Donkey Kong Country.
Although the game was 3D, the sprites were flat and rendered from a perspective above them. Rare found executing this convincingly too complicated, such as when the camera angle shifted, which would result in sprites interweaving. As head programmer Chris Sutherland described the philosophy of the shift in plans, "Although we had a lot less polygons, we could still imbue some character into the characters and the world, even though that left us with a much smaller polygon count."
Staff and workflow
The team comprised both experienced and inexperienced people; some had been working at Rare for 10 years while others had never previously worked on a video game. Ed Bryan was also a character artist, specifically Mumbo Jumbo and the Jinjos, as well as animator and box cover artist. Bryan has not revealed much about the making of the cover art, other than that Rare wanted him to "tell a story" with it. Kieran Connell was junior software engineer when the team said "the game had no chance of being completed on time," and Gavin Price joined as tester only a few months after receiving a demo of the game from Official Nintendo Magazine. Sutherland reported one morning where the Stamper brothers threw stones at his house window, as well as provided a McDonald's meal, to get him to work. According to Mayles, "We came up with the [...] idea that a pair of wings could appear from his backpack to help him perform a second jump. We also wanted Banjo to be able to run very fast when required [so] we added a pair of 'fast-running' legs that appeared from the bottom of the backpack. [And soon after] we came up with the logical conclusion that these could belong to another character, one that actually lived in Banjo's backpack." Specifically, Nintendo 64 models produced after Banjo-Kazooie release reduced the amount of time the console retained flash memory, making Stop 'N' Swop nearly impossible to activate as intended. The fact that the player could be transformed into small creatures was implemented to give some of the worlds a different sense of scale.
Because the advanced graphics technique caused significant memory fragmentation issues, the developers created a proprietary system that could "reshuffle" memory as players played through the game. He conceived Banjo-Kazooies musical style after listening to Danny Elfman's score for Beetlejuice (1988). As he explained the philosophy, "I realized you can use really dark chords with dark harmonies, and as long as the rhythm's quite comical it's not going to scare the kids". The compositions feature several instances of tritone to reflect the contrasts between Banjo and Kazooie's character, something Kirkhope conceived when composing the music for Mumbo's Mountain. At one point when the developers were nearly done with the game, Chris Stamper decided that he disliked the first two level tunes for Mumbo's Mountain and Treasure Trove Cove, so Kirkhope had to change them quickly. The original tune for Mumbo's Mountain would be used inside the termite hill, with Kirkhope thinking that it "suited the place". The original tune for Treasure Trove Cove had a middle section inspired by the Fat Boys and the Beach Boys' cover of "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris.
Banjo-Kazooie is significant for its introduction of vertical remixing to video games; various sound layers of the same composition fade in and out depending on which area the player has moved to, such as going from above ground to under water. This came from Mayles commanding Kirkhope to get a step beyond the early 1990s LucasArts' iMUSE, which faded between themes instead of sound layers.
After Dream was disbanded, Rare was focused on getting Banjo-Kazooie finished as much as possible.) were performed by Sutherland, who voiced Edison in Dream. Some of Edison's voice clips, such as "Guh-huh!", were re-used for Banjo. Mumbo's speech was made up of cut-up samples of Kirkhope's voice that would later be used on the soundtrack of the Mayahem Temple level in the game's sequel Banjo-Tooie, which Kirkhope revealed in an episode of Game Grumps was actually him saying, "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough," a famous English football chant. According to Kirkhope, Mumbo's "Oomenacka" came from something that Kirkhope said in a doctor's surgery while having his groin examined. He originally said, "Oh, me knacker," "knackers" being a British slang word for "testicles". Chris Seavor provided the voice of Gruntilda, who voiced Captain Blackeye in Dream.
Release and promotion
In June 1997, a working version of the game was shown at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, However, it was also met with skepticism as a rip-off of Super Mario 64 and overly cute, and despised its new name. N64 Magazine gave a glowing review of the panel, admitting it to be the event's most absorbing experience, even moreso than The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which received the most attention from other gamers and journalists. They considered the worlds immersive due to its "graphical opulence," such as the "incredibly realistic ripples" on the water, and choice of environments "realistic" even considering the cartoony characters. They also positively commented on its implementation of the dual-character mechanic (particularly how certain sections require a specific character unlike other games). but was delayed to give developers more time for polish. In the following months, Rare released screenshots at such a rate that by May 1998, N64 Magazine suspected the game was completed besides testing.
Banjo-Kazooie was released on 29 June 1998 in North America, 17 July 1998 in Europe, and 6 December 1998 in Japan as . In Europe, the game was released in the summer, an active season for Nintendo 64 releases that followed a scarce period and included games of various genres, such as Quest 64, Mortal Kombat 4, Off Road Challenge, Dezaemon 3D and Virtual Chess 64 (all 1998). It had a marketing budget of $10 million. At the 1999 Milia festival in Cannes, the game took home a "Gold" prize for revenues above €26 million in the European Union during 1998.
|NP=9.2/10
Banjo-Kazooie was complimented for the utilization of simultaneous control of two characters with different abilities, complimenting and contributing to the design of the rest of the game. Hypers Cam Shea also reported the controls as intuitive, as well as responsive, and enthusiastically wrote the incorporation of several abilities resulted in a variety of challenges and puzzles, making for an "action packed" experience.
Nintendo Acción, EGM and The Cincinnati Enquirer considered Banjo-Kazooies graphics the greatest in the N64 library. IGN awarded the game Overall Best Graphics of 1998,
| TX = 8.3/10 (X360)
| VG = 8/10 (X360)
A sequel, Banjo-Tooie, was released for the Nintendo 64 in 2000 and largely adopts the gameplay mechanics of its predecessor. The Xbox Live Arcade version was generally well received by critics, featuring an aggregate score of 77 out of 100 at Metacritic and generally considered a solid revival of a classic. One developer, Mark Kurko, has created several popular ROM hacks for the game, including The Jiggies of Time, a recreation of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and Nostalgia 64, a crossover between multiple Nintendo 64 games.
In 2024, a fan fully decompiled the original ROM image into C source code. On 25 January 2026, a team of modders released Banjo: Recompiled, a static recompilation of Banjo-Kazooie using a custom tool that helps translate N64 binaries into C. A native PC port was also unveiled, allowing the game to be played on Windows, MacOS and Linux without emulation, supporting unlimited frame rate, ultrawide monitors and modifications. The port's development team also worked with Kurko to create PC ports of The Jiggies of Time and Nostalgia 64, which were released alongside that of the main game. PC Gamer praised the recompilation, noting its "lack of input lag and uncanny visual clarity." five by Digital Spy in 2017, eight on rankings by Shacknews in 2021 and GamesRadar in 2022, thirteen by SVG.com in 2022, and two on a 2022 Destructoid top-five article. As Mark Beaumont jested, "A bear with a bird rucksack runs around a 3D platform jungle making some of the most annoying noises this side of the guy from Interpol singing – and somehow this made for one of the most engrossing games of a generation." Shacknews called it the fifth best Rare game in 2018, while New York magazine's Vulture website, in 2022, listed it as one of "The 25 Best Games on Nintendo Switch Online." In 2009, Game Informer ranked the game 71st in their list of the Top 100 Games Of All Time. In 2021, it ranked number 21 on Retro Gamers special edition of 100 Games To Play Before You Die: Nintendo Consoles Edition.
According to Nintendo Lifes 10/10 review of the Switch re-release, the game was "a benchmark for 3D platforming excellence that has rarely been replicated since."
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