Let’s just get this out of the way: I never played Banjo-Kazooie upon its release back in 1998. I know, blasphemy, right? So there I was rocking my Amiga 1200 like it was going out of style and thinking console gamers were all nerds with pricey toys who refused to use “real computers.” Yeah, Nintendo had been releasing N64 games for years at this point, and I’m sure I was quite the asshole about it. My logic? The Amiga had these custom chips that could do stuff the NES could only dream of and Nintendo would NEVER catch up.
Turns out I was wrong.
It wasn’t until 2003 that I finally came around and tried the console world for myself. A friend of mine at work was upgrading to a GameCube, so he sold me his extra N64 (yes he had TWO) for cheap. He threw in a bunch of football games I didn’t care about, and a bunch of racing games I never ended up playing. But along with it came this scratched up copy of Banjo-Kazooie.
The label was peeled off, the case was cracked, and honestly it looked like someone had washed it a dozen times. Worked fine though. After playing Banjo-Kazooie for maybe 10 minutes I felt like an idiot for ignoring consoles for so long.
The game just felt British to me. Not like super British where you’re watching Eastenders, but there was something about the writing, the characters and how everyone seemed to insult each other. Having now learned that Rare was based out of Twycross (about an hour outside of where I’m from in Manchester), of course it felt familiar – these guys probably shopped at the same Tesco’s my mum did.
I had played Super Mario 64 at this point (borrowed off the same work colleague) and loved what Nintendo did, but something about it just didn’t sit right with me. It felt too abstract, too… Japanese I guess you could say. All those floating platforms and pixelated paintings of witches blowing up demons. Graphically impressive for the time, sure, technical marvel, ya’da ya’da but it felt like I was running through someone else’s dream instead of an actual location. Every world in Banjo-Kazooie felt like I was roaming through actual places… OK yes these places had talking bears and creepy old witches that turn you into monkeys, but it still felt every bit as realistic as Mario 64.
And then there was the collecting. I would come home from work (I was a full-time Logistics Manager at the time, remember this is YEARS before they promoted me to assistant manager and completely ruined my life) and instantly pour my heart and soul into racking up Jiggies and collecting musical notes. Girlfriend at the time would find me, eyes glazed over, chucking shit at the TV at 2am and tell me grumpily I had to play it all over again because I missed two notes in Bubblegoop Swamp. She would shoot daggers at me every time but never actually voiced it out loud thank God.
Rare never made you feel like you were just collecting items for the sake of it. Placing a Jiggy inside one of their puzzles always felt like solving a puzzle. Notes were always placed with purpose. Other collect-a-thons at the time felt very hand-spanked. Nintendo Land came out recently and you have these treasure chests EVERYWHERE. Throw some gems inside them Nintendo! Problem was, Nintendo Land doesn’t have 100 gems hidden throughout the world like Banjo-Kazooie. They feel shoved into the worlds of Banjo-Kirby: Dreamland and Banjo-Tooie so you have something to collect. Banjo-Kazooie felt crafted. Each world has 100 notes and 10 jiggies. You know that every single note in that world was placed there for a reason.
Introducing you to skills with the use of Bottles the mole was amazing. So rather than hand you every power in the games right from the word go like other platformers do, Bottles would introduce you to skills as you go. Each new skill allowed you into areas of the map you passed 100 times prior, meaning previously explored worlds were new to you again. When I learned about the Beak Buster I remember thinking “Alright, I wonder if I can use this on that button I couldn’t reach earlier in Mumbo’s Mountain.” It’s rewarding because you feel like you’re being given a new tool that you can go back and tinker around with from your original starting point.
Gruntilda seemed like the epitome of British. Her rhyming everytime she was upset felt clunky and awkward – I bet that was the point. Trying so hard to sound villainous and intimidating yet all you come off as is some ugly witch that happens to rhyme. Every character in the game spoke with these weird distorted voices that you somehow knew gave them personality. They all sounded different. I could hear a character say “Me angry! You goanna die!” and know it was Gruntilda before I even saw her. Awesome voice acting all around.
Speaking of amazing worlds, each individual level within those worlds was pure genius theming. Treasure Trove Cove didn’t just LOOK like a coastal town, it ACTED like one. There were sandy areas with sandcastles, a lighthouse, pirate ships, you name it. Clanker’s Cavern looked like an abandoned factory that also happened to be haunted. Mad Monster Mansion checked off all the horror cliches, but who cared? It was a kids game about a talking bear and a purple bird dancing on skulls so we weren’t scared… right? Each world had purpose to its design, and stuck to their themes without re-using the same props over and over.
Click Clock Wood however…. Fucking hell. Click Clock Wood. Once I realised you played through the same damn forest four different times under different season rules, with changes that affected not only how it LOOKED but how it played and how you solved puzzles, I turned the game off and sat in my chair for a good minute. This was graphics from 1998 we’re talking about – no, lets be clear. I played it in 2003, but it was designed in 1998 – and they created an ACTIVE world that changed based on seasons. The seed you helped plant in Spring would grow into a tree you could climb in Autumn. Characters aged, their problems changed with the season. Storytelling through the environment and nothing else. If more modern games could take notes from that.
Seasonal changes also added variety to the gameplay. Mumbo would morph you into different animals – a termite, a pumpkin, a walrus to name a few. Each one had different abilities and controls that YOU HAD TO LEARN. They weren’t just there for flavor. You actually had to PLAY as that specific animal. The termite could climb but was fragile. The walrus was bulletproof but sluggish on land. Learning these new controls was like being given a little bonus game inside the main game. And it was ALL INCORPORATED into the games DNA. These weren’t tacked on opportunities to play as a puppet or whatever $#@! Dragon’s Lair Adventures pulled.
I could honestly go on for DAYS about the music alone. Transitioning from land to underwater music when you dove, cavern music when you were in a cave, muffled music when you went indoors. Hearing each individual worlds catchy main theme as you soared towards it on a glider. I could STILL hum you the Freezeezy Peak theme right now.
But I kept saying how British everything felt. It wasn’t just in the writing though. It was the comedic animations, the jokes Kazooie made at everyone’s expense (poor Bottles took the brunt of that hammer), it was toilet humour that ACTUALLY WORKED because the games dumb as rocks humor made it stupid funny instead of trying to be crude for the sake of swearing. The entire game oozed with a disrespectful charm that was never mean-spirited but had more bite than Nintendo would allow.
And for that reason I felt it oozed a certain… charm you only get if you’re British. A charm you get from reading The Beano or playing Worms. Humor and experiences that is uniquely British and will never quite hit home with anyone else.
But going back and playing Banjo-Kazooie for the first time in 2003, I was doing so with rose-tinted glasses different from those who had boogeyed when it was new. I wasn’t judging it off the small pool of N64 games I was limited to back in ‘98, I was comparing it to every game I’d played up until that point; some of which were early PS2 games and even Gamecube games. And guess what? It STILL held up. Sure the graphics were ancient to me by then but gameplay? Characters? World building? ALL timeless classics.
Camera aside (and we’ll get to that), the N64 hardware was never an issue. Anyone who played these old-school 3D games will know that camera systems were often a gamer’s worst enemy; but Rare pulled it off. You could zoom the camera out for a better view when you needed it, auto-camera was usually smart about what it was doing and manual camera controls were responsive when you needed precision. Far from perfect (NONE of the N64 games are perfect when talking camera) but admirable considering the hardware they were working with.
What really stood out to me was how confident Rare were in their product. You could tell they knew they were onto something special and it showed in almost every decision they made. Levels weren’t TOO big that you get lost or bored but big enough you actually felt free to explore. It wasn’t too hard or too easy. Finding new Jinjos kept you motivated and aiming for multiple goals without feeling overloaded. Everything about the game’s design felt well planned out.
The end result? I beat Banjo-Kazooie THREE TIMES in under a year. 1st playthrough was just to enjoy it and complete it. 2nd playthrough was to 100% it, find all the notes and Jiggies, every Jinjo. 3rd playthrough was to show my family and friends and convince them that this strangly-looking game about a bear and a bird was ACTUALLY good. Even my younger brother, who was knee deep in his PS2 phase at the time, laughed at how “childish the graphics are” before stealing my N64 and playing Banjo-Kazooie for two weeks straight.
Banjo-Tooie expanded on pretty much everything. Worlds were bigger, you gained new skills, more gameplay interconnectivity between levels. It SHOULD have been better. And in a lot of ways it was. But it missed the charm and concise perfection of the original. Worlds felt TOO big. Collecting started to become a chore rather than a rewarding experience. Bigger isn’t always better, and Banjo-Kazooie proved that sometimes limitations allow for better design than infinite possibilities.
Needless to say, after years of playing 3D platformers Banjo-Kazooie still stands as one of my favourites of the genre. Building upon the legacy that Mario 64 set before it, it created it’s own identity. It’s own sense of humour. It’s own style. It created locations you actually wanted to explore rather than simply plot courses through caves and forests. It proved British developers could make games on par with Nintendo’s finest, while staying proudly British.
I still have my N64 set up on my desk to this very day (HELP MEEE. Married someone who gave up years ago at trying to convince me to pack my gaming away). I still go back every couple of years and play Banjo-Kazooie and it never fails to entertain me. Characters jump all over the place, the audio’s whacked and the graphics are horrific. But goddamn if that game doesn’t play just AS GOOD as it did back then. More importantly, it still puts a smile on my face. In an industry filled with games that feel focus-tested and made by committee, it’s refreshing to play a game that so obviously comes from people who love what they do.
Oh and did I mention that beat-up copy of Banjo-Kazooie I bought from my work mate YEARS ago STILL works? Stupid amount of times I’ve wiped that disc and it still loads up perfectly. Label’s completely gone at this point and the case holding the disks is kept together with duct tape. But it works. Games can come from the most unlikely places -Anime music videos and wasting my life away playing games on the dreamcast- but I’ll never forget where Banjo-Kazooie taught it to me.
Samuel’s been gaming since the Atari 2600 and still thinks 16-bit was the golden age. Between accounting gigs and parenting teens, he keeps the CRTs humming in his Minneapolis basement, writing about cartridge quirks, console wars, and why pixel art never stopped being beautiful.
0 Comments