Random: Banjo-Kazooie Creator Reacts To Duo's Bittersweet Cameo In The Latest Smash Trailer

As a fan, it makes me yearn for a BK game that looks as great as they did in this trailer. Since Perfect Dark is getting a reboot and Battletoads has already, I have hope that Banjo and Kazooie won't go forgotten for that much longer.

That comment is definitely interesting, could Banjo-Kazooie really be making a comeback?

I think they should do a new game closer to the style of the first two while also introducing some new ideas. Nuts and Bolts felt too much like a different game set in the Banjo World, and the meta jokes mocking collectathons was just an insult to the fans.

the rare buyout was such a big blow. oh what couldve been

@AnnoyingFrenzy Yeah Perfect Dark and Battletoads indicate that they’re at least revisiting old IPs. What people need to realise is that any BK game just would have tanked on Xbox One. There weren’t enough units out there, especially among the target demographic. Nowadays, with Game Pass on multiple devices, I reckon it could work rather well.

Because we're dying to know everything about a series that hasn't even sold 7 million copies in 22 years.

Coming from someone who never really had much nostalgia for Banjo-Kazooie, yeah I'd like to see them return properly, if only to see the fan reactions when they finally get a proper new game.

@nessisonett One can hope, it certainly looks much more promising now than it has been in years.

Microsoft when they make the 50th Gears of War and Halo games instead of a game that's been begged for literal decades:

I always regretted not getting this on N64 when I had the chance. Having never bought a Microsoft console (never been able to justify owning all 3, and Sony and Nintendo cover everything but Rare that I want to play) means I've sadly never played Banjo-Kazooie outside Smash. Hope that changes one day and they at least come to VC.

That's such an easy question. Of course they should bring them back. I would buy Banjo-Threeie in a heartbeat.

I hope we get a new banjo and kazooie game, Yooka and laylee was ok but the bear and bird duo Would probably much better.

I hope if the switch gets GBA games they release the banjo and kazooie on it

Couldn’t Nintendo just buy them back? Pull a Disney move like how they did with Spider-Man from Sony? I’d love to buy a new Banjo game!

@Monzerol : Banjo Thrust?

@AG_Awesome I actually had fun with Banjo on GBA. Was a good time. Not a bad way to bring the series isometric.

@TDRsuperstar2 Disney still doesn't own Spider-Man. They are basically renting him until further notice.

@backup368. Who spit in your coffee, man?

If they’re not using the IP, they should consider selling it back to Nintendo the same way Disney sold Power Rangers back to Saban.

@nessisonett @AnnoyingFrenzy Y'all are forgetting Killer Instinct, and that upsets me.
I kid. Apparently Microsoft is having other studios work on these Rare titles, so I kinda hope they'll work wit a team that actually knows how to make a damn good 3D platforming collect-a-thon. Playtonic would make sense, but I personally feel like Gears for Breakfast is the team I would hire.

While it was fun to see them at the Game Awards, I wish Rare and Microsoft would actually do SOMETHING with the franchise.
Even if their next entry was the final one in the series, I’d at least feel some closure. Right now, it feels lacking that the modern Rare takes their legacy for granted and that’s a massive shame.

@KayFiOS I could never forget Killer Instinct, I just didn't include it because that was at the start of the last generation compared to Perfect Dark and Battletoads which were this year. Killer Instinct 2013 is actually my second favorite fighting game. If you check out my profile I have an image of Sabrewulf (my main) as the banner.

Sell the property over to Nintendo/Retro, along with Conker. Microsoft/Rare isn't doing squat with them.

Banjo making a comeback on a nintendo console?

@kingbk They just announced a new Perfect Dark last night.

Look on the bright side - it's better that they look THIS AMAZING than the Nuts and Bolts incarnation. If Perfect Dark can get a new game, so can Banjo-Kazooie!

@HotGoomba___Rebrand you mean like Nintendo with f-zero?

@ErinIcedMocha Did I hit a nerve there?

I would instantly buy a BK game on Switch—though I suspect it would only land there after a stint as an Xbox / PC exclusive given Microsoft’s ownership.

In the meantime, Yooka-Laylee is giving me those BK feels!

Kazooie's mouth looks grosser the more I stare at it.

@norwichred

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED

Nintendo when they make the 1000000000th Mario game instead of a new F-Zero:

I'd love a switch version..... a true banjo threeie?? Yooka scratched the itch but I miss a true successor :/

I love banjo and kazooie. Microsoft buying rare and basically sitting on it sucks for us..

@Mgene15 Fans shouldn't complain when they refused to buy Nuts and Bolts.

@backup368 7 million, source?

@backup368 yeah we are actually! By the way how many games have been sold that you ever made? 7 million is hardly something to be ashamed about, for only 2 proper games, on a low selling console btw. Banjo Kazooie was the greatest 3D platformer of all time in many peoples eyes when it came out and still in many peoples top 5 today. Do us a favour, Go back to playing COD and FIFA lol and leave us alone!

@KazooieTooie 6.33 from combined sales on VGChartz. There are no official sales figures from Rare.

@backup368 cool to know. But why being salty, it's a classic game character.

I'm almost 100% sure, almost, that we will get a remake of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie with updated graphics, just like Activision did with Crash Bandicoot and Spyro and Nickelodeon with Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom.

sighs I wish the stars would aline and Rare gives the people get what they want. I’ve grown tired of seeing these guys occasionally pop up and everybody gets all misty eyed and nostalgic! 😂 Seriously, though. It would be great to see a PROPER return! I still remember the awesome trailer for the last game. I wish I was as fond of the final product.

@backup368 I bought Nuts and Bolts. So I get to complain right.

@backup368 nuts and bolts sucked!

Practically every videogame publisher has ay least one major, still beloved IP that, for whatever reason, they haven't touched in years or decades, often despite tons of fan requests for them. Nintendo has F-Zero and Advance Wars, to name a couple. Konami has Suikoden and pretty much their entire catalog outside of Metal Gear and Castlevania. Sega has scarcely bothered with anything other than Sonic for almost two decades running.

Of course, most or all of these can be traced to one basic thing: money/profit margins. Banjo-Kazooie's most basic problem is likely that its publisher Rare was purchased by Microsoft, whose XBox consoles primarily target FPS fans and Mature-rated games. That may not be the sole reason, of course, but demographics absolutely play a role in determining projected sales and profitability.

The only thing gamers can do about any of this is to vote with our wallets. If an opportunity ever comes to support the return of a beloved franchise, it's imperative for us to step up to the plate and support them (preferably from Day One in order to help the aforementioned profit figures). At the end of the day, gamers are passionate about games, but corporations are passionate about money. To get what we want we must speak their language.

I mean if there‘s anything like a right time to make a comeback then it‘s now. With Spyro and Crash returning with so much success it‘s hard to believe Banjo couldn‘t make a great comeback as well. Given that it‘s properly done of course.

Microsoft should loan the IP to playtonic

All I want is Rare Replay on Switch

@backup368 I hate this logic, that it's fans fault that there isn't a classic style Banjo game because they refused to buy Nuts and Bolts. It never makes sense when applied to any series. Why should the game we want be held hostage behind games we don't want? There's nothing wrong with branching out and experimenting, but the reason people hated Nuts and Bolts, Chibi Robo Zip Lash, modern Paper Mario, Metroid Prime Federation Force etc. is because the classic games we fell in love haven't seen the light of day in years or even decades, and instead we're being served stuff nobody asked for. Want fans to buy your games? Make the games your fans want.

Hah! That moment when you click on a news item and see your best mate’s tweet made the headlines. I’d love a new BK but I don’t think anything can capture that magic of the original game. The game industry has moved on, and so have we.

I'd have loved to hear Banjo hit the first two notes of One Winged Angel on his banjo.

@KayFiOS Playtonic wouldn't make sense. The poor guys learnt nothing from Donkey Kong 64 or the past 20 years of Mario platformers - Yooka laylee is unfortunately one of the worst collectathons in years.

HD remakes of the First 2 games with the smash bros models

@KazooieTooie I must have struck a chord.

I mean is there ANY hope that, given the comfortable relationship bw Nintendo and Microsoft, that the Banjo Kazooie property could ever be purchased by Nintendo? I think it would be a win win win. Microsoft gets good press and money, Nintendo gets a beloved property that’s associated with the N64 and fans loose their collective f-ing minds. Just my two cents. Lol

@Duffman92 great point, totally agree. Platforms are making a comeback, esp anything tinged with 90’s nostalgia. This is the time for Banjo Kazooie.

@norwichred No no, you forgot the one that definitely fits it for Nintendo, the mother series. What they've done with that series is basically the same as Microsoft except worse, because at least banjo & kazoore had all their games re-released in recent years even if that was in 2015.

@backup368 You mean the terrible game that didn't even fit the franchise's artstyle identity much less actually functioned as a 3D collectathon platformer in favor of vehicle building? Nuts and Bolts was a bad game as evidenced by the fans' reactions and fan/professional reviews, a number of YouTube retrospectives (JonTron as an entertaining highlight), and tanking the franchise even in the hands of money-hungry Microsoft.

I guess fans are stupid for not buying Sonic Boom and should have felt blessed to have the original horrifying movie design for Sonic. Tell you what, maybe Mario should have taken a long hiatus after Super Mario Sunshine.
That's you. That's how you sound, you revisionist contrarian.

@BoyfriendOfDeath okay well then still the same idea applies... let Nintendo “rent” them. Develop a game, share the profits, everyone wins.

@KingBowser86 Yet the fans are complaining that Microsoft is "basically sitting on Rare". Rare's own IPs never sold well. Rare had made games like Conker: Live and Reloaded, Grabbed by the Ghoulies, Viva Pinata, and Kameo, and they flopped. Had you supported your favorite character like you should have, then perhaps the series would have still continued. Sea of Thieves is Rare's most successful game by far - wasn't even their own idea.

Forgive me if I don't see any parallels between Rare's success and the demand for the games that Nintendo fans want from them.

RARE and its properties should be sold back to Nintendo. MS has done Jack all with their IPs and they’re just rotting in the shadows because of it.

Give them back to Nintendo, please. I miss my classic jungle platformers, conspiracy laden shooters and sci fi adventures...

What I would give to play Eternal Darkness again.. that game still haunts my dreams to this day.

@RareFan
I highly doubt it. We already got a release of the first two with upgraded graphics on Xbox Arcade release in 2008 and 2009.

Banjo <3.....
....Kazooie... <3....

...sigh...

@liveswired I meant that it would make sense to hire the guys who worked on Banjo-Kazooie in the first place, but there's a reason why I wouldn't choose them and I would choose the people who made A Hat in Time instead: those guys actually did learn from Rare's mistakes and from what Mario and other games did right over the years, the result is an amazing game that I'd love to return to, if only to get those damn advanced contracts.

@Yosher I can tell you what the reactions will be. 3/4 will be pissed cuz it won't be good enough or what they had in mind. The rest will probably not say anything, lol.

I never played BK. I loved mario platformers, but those are the only ones i took the time to play as i got older, since that genre wasn't important enough to me to take my time from other genres i loved (mainly jrpgs, which required lots of my time). I'm not sure i would play a new one all the way through, even if it was great. I'd definitely try it on game pass to see what all the fuss was about all these years. I can't play older games with any adoration, as i waited way too long to get out of those generations when i lived through them. I was a "graphics whore" at times when there were nothing but eyesores. Every game i played, i couldn't help but imagine what if could be, immersion wise, if the graphics were better. Now that we're here, i can't go back, lol.

@twztid13 Depends on how they handle it. They could definitely manage to please all (or most) of the old fans if they set their hearts out to do it and don't just let the $$$ speak.

@Klobb Why didn't you want a Banjo-kazooie game? Don't you love mascots riding around in carts?

THAT SONIC RENDER IS SO GOOD! I HAVEN'T SEEN HIM PORTRAYED THIS WELL SINCE THE START OF THE META ERA!

@Chlocean Grunty's Revenge is a short and sweet game and Banjo Pilot is one of the best mascot racing on the GBA.

The original Banjo is still the best in my opinion. Twooie is an excellent follow-up but too big and too ambitious. Grunty's Revenge is short and sweet, very true to the original despite being isometric, not losing too much in translation. Banjo Pilot is a fun mascot racing. As for Nuts and Bolts, played It a few times, but never got it, the vehicle building mechanism was not a good fit for the series honestly.

Honestly, I wish rare and Nintendo never separated. I want rare to make another donkey kong game(the ones on Wii and switch are desent, but I can't help but think if rare made them they would have been better, and had a lot more "extras", and other things to do than the ones created by the company that makes the games now(I forget their name.)
Actually, I'd love a 3D DK game. Maybe a sequel to Conker's Bad Fur Day?

With smash, in the past 10+ yrs, Nintendo has done more for Megaman than Capcom, more for Banjo than Microsoft, arguably more for Castlevania than Konami, arguably more for Sonic than Sega, more for Pac-Man than Namco, and more for Cloud until FF7R came out. It just blows my mind how much care they put into all the new characters

@AtlanteanMan

“ Banjo-Kazooie's most basic problem is likely that its publisher Rare was purchased by Microsoft, whose XBox consoles primarily target FPS fans and Mature-rated games. That may not be the sole reason, of course, but demographics absolutely play a role in determining projected sales and profitability.”

I don’t really think the Xbox market being perceived as an FPS console has much to do with it at all. On the Xbox 360 Rare not only shipped a Banjo Kazooie title, they also shipped the even more child friendly titles Viva Piñata 1 and 2, a game that even had an animated TV series behind it. I wouldn’t say there’s any real indication that Rare was forced into focusing on mature games.

As it stands, it’s quite possible that the current Rare team, which is 20 years removed from the staff developing for the N64, would rather focus on IP other than BK or other pre-existing IP. To that end Everwild to me looks interesting, as was Sea of Thieves.

I’d be surprised if at some point MS doesn’t release a BK title. They’ve revived Battletoads and Perfect Dark, and they now have a larger group of first party devs to whom they can pass along the IP.

Unsure why people think Nintendo would be hugely interested in buying the IP though when Mario is still firing on all cylinders. Even on the N64 M64 outsold BK 3:1 almost. If Nintendo wants to do a platformer that’s not Mario, they have other IP to draw off or the talent to create something new. If MS is going to give someone access to the IP, it’ll be to ship it for the Xbox and Nintendo of all companies has shown no sign of distributing games to competing platforms.

Maybe if they had guns or other weapons of war they’d be appealing to a western publisher

@0blivion if Nintendo missed them they would have created more in the same vein.

Well Rare did accept the buyout. So I don’t really feel bad for the creators. They did a business deal and whatever happened afterwards was a direct result of that choice.

@uhhhhhhhh : I don't think there's much to dispute there. Sega is the worst thing to have ever happened to Sonic, and they own/conceived the friggin' brand.

honeslty nuts n bolts failed with the fact that enemies were to scarce. there werent enough. and they made banjo and kazooie ugly asf

@Smigit As I said, demographics are only one possible reason for the length of time since the last BK title (Nuts & Bolts). But it's worth mentioning that A) Nuts and Bolts and both Pinata games were released for the XBox 360...meaning an entire console generation has gone by since then.

Business models can also absolutely play a role in why great game franchises quietly disappear. Take TimeSplitters, for instance; players like myself spent countless hours making our own intricate maps in the Map Maker and playing them with friends and family locally via the fast-paced, excellent splitscreen. By the third installment the franchise had been bought up by EA...and then it vanished. The primary reason? The online capability of the XBox 360 and PS3 made for far too many lucrative means of exploitation, whether it was Day One DLC, Map Packs (later Season Passes, Loot Crates, and the like), or of course a focus on online multiplayer, which required each player to have their own console, copy of the game, and whatever DLC everyone else in the "party" had. Local multiplayer and map editors no longer had a place in such business models (it's also definitely a key reason why Halo's Forge wasted that entire feature by not including Bots, expecting players to find others online to play their created maps with...or not), and TS was all about those things, so we haven't seen it in 15 years. That right there should illustrate the disconnect between what's important to gamers and what's important to corporations at the end of the day.

What business models could have to do with the likes of BK and Pinata should be obvious: games like those typically don't make as much after the initial point-of-sale as their DLC and Season Pass-laden "AAA" brethren. Rare is frankly a bit out of place among most of Microsoft's other publishers in terms of not just general products and target demographics but also their business approach, historically speaking. At any rate, there are certainly reasons behind the scenes that caused some of BK's core creative talent to leave Rare and found their own company, Playtonic (the makers of Yooka-Laylee).

@Klobb I know exactly where you're coming from. Sega's Valkyria Chronicles is another great example of that; after years of fan requests for a sequel to the amazing original, Sega released VC: Azure, which wasn't even a SRPG but a bland hack-n-slash title. It received a downright angry reception from fans, and quickly went to the bargain bins. Fortunately when Sega finally released VC 4 (2 and 3 were released on the PSP...the latter in Japan only...so they never found that much of an audience especially in the West), they made it a proper SRPG and put a similar effort into its characters, worldbuilding, and features. And fans responded by buying the game. Simple.

While Sega gets a lot of (entirely justified) criticism from me regarding their ignoring pretty much their entire catalog of beloved IPs in favor of churning out Sonic every single year, they're far from the only publisher that's either A) radically altered the core mechanics of a beloved franchise to "appeal to a broader selection of gamers" (which historically rarely if ever works) and/or B) used such a "token" effort to justify why they aren't releasing games for a given IP anymore due to "lack of interest". Front Mission: Evolved by Square/Enix changed the SRPG gameplay the series was known for to a third-person mech game, which expectedly tanked. The result? We haven't seen another FM title since then (PS3). The Shining Force franchise has never been the same since switching from its SRPG roots to bland action RPGs. And major RPG franchises like the Final Fantasy series lost a lot of longtime fans by abandoning party-based, menu-micromanaging, turn-based controls for combo-heavy, hack-n-slash mechanics that make party management and/or keeping people alive an outright chore; no amount of beautiful CGI can overcome tearing out the heart and soul of what made a franchise what it is.

@AnnoyingFrenzy I hope so as well.

@BoyfriendOfDeath

In theory, yes. The question is how much would it cost and would it be worth it? Nintendo is a business after all and it would only make sense for them to buy Rare (or license Banjo) if they thought there would be a significant return on the investment.

@TDRsuperstar2

Disney owns Spider-Man and all Marvel characters. Sony owns the film rights to Spider-Man for a limited period of time and that is what Disney has “rented”.

@liveswired that’s obvious.

I still don't understand why non-Nintendo characters are added to Smash Bros. By this I mean characters not to appear on Nintendo consoles like Cloud and Sephiroph. Beyonetta, Sonic and Snake have appeared on Nintendo consoles in their own games.

@4by3

This no longer applies: Final Fantasy VII is on the Switch, after all.

@Beaucine It just feels weird when Smash Bros adds characters from a game that wasn't originally on a Nintendo console in it's first release. If for example FFVII was on PS1 and N64, then it would be fine. But porting a game decades later to a Nintendo console (Switch) seems to validate it for characters for Smash. Snake is the closest example I can think of, if he hadn't appeared on the NES then the MGS "real" remake would permit him to added to Smash. FF7 on Switch is remastered, which is just a port with alterations.

@4by3

I get what you're saying, but at this point Smash is an inclusive celebration of gaming. The barrier to entry — in terms of connection to Nintendo and its consoles — is low to the point of being unnoticeable. As long as there's some kind of release that justifies the inclusion, it's good to go.

BK is only happening if Rare is out of the mature focused XB community. New Perfect Dark is being made by The Initiative.

Banjos: Spam breegul blaster online
Sakurai: I'm going to almost kill them

@TDRsuperstar2 rare should buy them back I agree

Seeing the duo in the trailer gave me fuzzies.