THE TEAM WAS BORED OF THE OLD FORMULA.
Game Radar: Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts Interview with Gregg Mayles, Creative Director
Last time you made a Banjo game you were under Nintendo's wing. Now you're in bed with Microsoft. What's the difference?
Mayles: In terms of our thinking behind the Banjo game, zero. We consciously have made no decisions because it's for a different company. Obviously we've got the use of multiplayer this time, which - although in Banjo-Tooie we did explore it to a certain degree, we certainly couldn't do half the stuff we've got planned for multiplayer this time.
I guess that's really the only difference. Everything is much the same. The humour's the same, the characters are the same, [and so is] the feel of the game.
A lot of people who are going to be interested in Nuts & Bolts will be fans of the original, but you're not just aiming the game at them, right...?
Mayles: Oh no, certainly not. Our fan base will only shrink in time, it doesn't increase. Obviously we have to appeal to new fans. It's difficult. You look back for tradition's sake and put stuff in there that'll appeal to old fans, but I think it's more important to have an eye on the future. We could quite easily have churned out a very shiny, high-polygon traditional Banjo game, but that wouldn't have attracted too many new fans to be honest. I think a lot of the current Xbox players, or people that are considering buying an Xbox, would love to then say, "Oh, it's just more of the same. Galaxy is better, blah blah blah".
Destructoid interview: Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts with Shaun Read, Game Designer
It has been many long years since we last saw Banjo-Kazooie on a home console. What made you decide that now was the time to resurrect them after such a long time in videogame character purgatory?
Read: I don’t think anyone here at Rare ever really thought the bear had gone for good, more like in a period of hibernation. The truth is we didn’t want to make 'just another' platformer and not until now has the technology allowed us make a game as new and exciting as we thought the franchise deserved.
Gregg Mayles Interview – Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts
For Banjo-Kazooie 3, was that idea of making your own vehicles game mechanic, did that evolve from another idea that had something to do with Banjo or was it a separate idea that came forth from Banjo?
Mayles: It was a separate idea, we wanted to take a different approach to platform games.
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Interview
Elissa Miller, Voice Actor for Humba Wumba, Game Designer
Neill Harrison, Lead Technical Artist
This game is quite a departure from the previous Banjo titles. Is the platform genre dying out, do you think? There are a lot of in-game jokes at the expense of "old-fashioned" platform games.
Elissa Miller: I'm not sure if it's that - I think we just felt that another platform-specific game might be a bit boring. We thought we needed to be a bit more innovative. We look at it as an evolution of the platform game. I guess [the genre] had its peak in the late '90s, and now we're in the '00s we're trying to bring it up to date with more elements. I think today it's about owning your gaming and just having fun with it - you make your own game, really. That's what we've been trying to do with this, with the build-your-own vehicles. It's more your experience, rather the developer's experience for the gamers.
Neill Harrison: It's interesting that a lot of developers have simultaneously done this. Certainly on our part we started the development before we knew about those games, and I'm sure they started before they knew about us. So it's strange that we all started to go down this route at the same time. I don't know why it happened, but it is interesting!
Q&A: Banjo-Kazooie Programmer, Sal Fileccia
Salvatore Fileccia, Lead Software Engineer
How nervous were you about revealing the game? What expectations did you have?
Salvatore Fileccia: Our biggest worry is whether people would understand what we're trying to do with it. In essence, we're not changing* Banjo*, but trying to evolve it. And this gives us a lot more scope for gameplay. Obviously Banjo has a big following from the games of old, and a community which cares a lot and we care about them. We don't want to let them down.
It's a radical approach.
Salvatore Fileccia: Platforming, in many people's opinion – and I would agree – reached its pinnacle... not even the last generation, but the generation before. Since then it's been a case of adding more triangles and improving the resolution, which isn't really extending it. When we set out to make this, we really wanted to extend the genre. Physics was the first port of call – more interaction for free as well, if you know what I mean. Parts came from the designers and we evolved on that.
Is it good for Rare to go back to Banjo? It's been a long time.
Salvatore Fileccia: Yes. Every developer's the same: you finish a game and you never make the game you started out to make. So many ideas and suggestions you just don't have the time to implement. The same with Banjo-Tooie: We finished that and we had quite a few ideas. A lot of the ideas you see in the game come from just talking after we finished it.
Banjo-Kazooie for Nintendo 64 was the first game in this series. How have you and the company changed since then?
Salvatore Fileccia: I've changed a lot. I didn't have any gray hairs before I started working here. The company itself has changed quite a bit too. But everything's changed in the industry. The technology to put a game together and the production values have changed. And the scale. When I joined the Banjo-Tooie team, it was thirteen people. Six programmers. Six artists. Two designers and a sound guy. Whereas now, at its peak, it'll have 71 people.
Your scale is huge. You just can't write everything from scratch. That's how the company has changed. When I joined there were a lot of small teams making prototypes, while nowadays – since the company hasn't actually grown that much – the amount of games we can sustain is reduced as the teams have shot up in size.
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| Beta screenshot provided by Rare during Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts development. |
Phil Spencer, Microsoft Executive
How nervous were you about revealing the game? What expectations did you have?
Phil Spencer: Team sizes are so different now and we have more animators now than the full Banjo 1 team, but the key core team is really the same.
Phil Spencer: Certain people look at the bear and the bird and think it's a kids' game. What we think is that Banjo as an intellectual property has the ability to span audiences.
Phil Spencer: For us in the next Banjo game it was about evolving the gameplay while keeping the approachability of the characters, but the depth of the gameplay is very important. This can't turn into some minigame-based paper game. It has to be something that has a ton of substance.
Phil Spencer: It'll be familiar to fans of the originals in terms of style, absolutely, and in terms of setting, story and characters. In terms of it being another platformer? I think that genres evolve, and that's what we're doing with this game. So you might call it something else when it comes out - but it's the same team and it's staying true to that team and what it believes in.
Phil Spencer: Banjo has never seen another platform. The original gameplay ideas were on this box [Xbox 360] and that's where they'll ship.
x360a Meets: Rare and Talks Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Elissa Miller, Voice Actor for Humba Wumba, Game Designer
Neill Harrison, Lead Technical Artist
Was the game always intended to get this huge customisation feature or was it kind of introduced after the development had started?
Neill Harrison: No, we started just wanting to do a new Banjo game and we thought we’ll do a HD version of Banjo-Kazooie essentially. We actually started developing that as developers, and as gamers it just didn’t feel like the sort of game we would want to buy actually. It felt a little bit stale. It felt a little bit like we’d done it before and there was so many new possibilities with the new console that we could do and we were like “why are we doing the same sort of thing again?” So we kind of ruled that out as like “we don’t want to do that, we want to keep all the good things that people like” because it was successful but we wanted to take it in a new direction.
So that’s pretty much why the new title is more vehicle based?
Neill Harrison: On previous games you were in a very complicated level or challenge and there is only one way to do it and that was the way we designed it. You have to jump here, you have swim there, you have to grab this ledge and do this. Yeah, that’s fine, but every time you’ll play that level it’s exactly the same experience. You would have the same experience as you would. We kind of really wanted to move away from that really.
The idea with the vehicles just came through from us wanting to give the player control over their abilities and that’s kind of how we see it. It’s still a Banjo-Kazooie game and it is really a platformer at its heart, but instead of us telling you how you’re going to do a challenge, we just give you the building blocks.
Do you think this shift will upset fans with it being such a big 3D platformer and then transitioning to what we have now?
Elissa Miller: I think you’re always going to have to come up against some sort of resistance of change, whatever you do. Like I said before, if we had done a rehash and a normal platformer, then they would have had a go at us for not being innovative. So whatever you do, you’re always going to be in the wrong, but we just made a game we enjoy playing and that we hope people are going to pick up.
The response from previous Banjo gamers, previous fans has been really, really positive so that’s been great for us to see that because they are really important to us, as well as getting new gamers too.
Neill Harrison: The main problem is just getting people to pick it up and play it. When people play it, if people are an old fan of Banjo and you play this, you’ll realise that it is a Banjo game. It really is. The problem with it is, if you just see a screenshot... Say if I see a screenshot of a racing game, I know how that game plays... It’s a racing game. Whereas if someone sees a screenshot of ours, they don’t really understand it. They maybe assume it’s a car game or a racing game, But it’s not until they really play that they realise.
That’s always the risk with doing something different and that’s kind of good for us because it proves that it is almost unique because people don’t understand it. It’s just time now to get people to play it so they can get the idea behind it.
Banjo Kazooie 3 interview by Gamereactor
Salvatore Fileccia, Lead Software Engineer
The game also looks great, I have to say. What have you done to both advance technology but also keep the same look and style from the original games?
Salvatore Fileccia: One of the things that we felt, was when we were doing the vehicle mechanic before were doing a traditional next-generation adding much more triangles, smoothing everything off, we felt that took away some of the appeal that we had from the N64 characters. So we implemented a more blocky approach which still uses a lot of triangles but it’s very stylistic and sorta added that extra emphasis on what the characters were about but kept them close to where they’re from as well.
How do you think fans of the previous Banjo-kazooie games will react to the game?
Salvatore Fileccia: I mean the core of the team is the team who worked on the previous two games. So obviously Banjo is quite important to us as are the fans. We tried to evolve the game but keep the things that were important to the fans. It seems the humor is still there, the wacky humor. All the wacky characters are still there with new additions. They’ll look evolved from the previous games but still recognizable. With a new extra element and tried to inject what we see what would be change in the old genre
Interview with several now defunct fan sites with Gregg Mayles
The overall reaction from our site's Banjo diehards has been mixed, with many of them concerned that Nuts & Bolts is less a Banjo game and more a game with Banjo randomly stuck in it. How would you defend it to fans that were originally drawn in by B-K's move-based platforming?
Mayles: It's true that anyone wanting a carbon copy of the previous 2 games will be disappointed so I'm not even going to make out that it is. What I believe it to be is an evolution of the platform adventure genre. The genre is too stale, it needed shaking up, so we are trying something different, but within the framework of a 'traditional' Banjo game. It has a familiar structure, things to collect, characters to talk to and all the humour you would expect. I said on one forum that all we have done is to make the travelling fun. So that pretty much sums it up, we have taken the boring bit (travelling) and made it fun
Six years ago Microsoft told the game press a racing game was in development by Rare. Are there any elements from that game you have used for BK3?
Mayles: No. The new engine for Banjo that allows the creation and control of the vehicles is brand new and WAY ahead of what that game was going to be. Generations ahead. I haven't seen anything quite like what we've got. The ability to create a 3D vehicle that behaves how you would expect? A real achievement for our software team I assure you
How long have you worked for this sequel? Had you envisaged to make this new game suitable for the old consoles like the original Xbox or actually like an add-on developed for 64DD?
Mayles: No, this game would not have been possible before. The sheer computing power required to make the vehicles work and the physics involved could not have been done. It's the fact that you can combine anything in any number that makes it such a technical challenge. This is actually the 3rd Banjo 3! We scrapped two other approaches, didn't think they offered a big enough step forward. I bet you didn't expect that! So I would say it started after Ghoulies. But then got scrapped a couple of times. Then I worked on Pinata. Then came back to Banjo again! Oh, and I think I did some puzzles for Mr. Pants too!
Rare Talks Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Neill Harrison, Lead Technical Artist
What was the reasoning behind altering the gameplay from previous Banjo outings so drastically?
Neill Harrison: So a lot of people are confused in some respects in that... why didn't we just do another platformer, why didn't we just do Banjo Kazooie again? The main reason for that is that we started working along those lines, and it just felt a little bit stale, it felt dated, it felt old, and we wanted to do something a little bit new and adventurous - the hardware's so much more powerful now. And we thought "why should the player have to complete the challenge in one way?"
If we could somehow give the player control over how you complete the challenges it's going to be so much more fun." And that's where the idea for the vehicles came in. So it's still very much a Banjo Kazooie game, it's just that we've removed Kazooie's abilities and given the player the components. So now it's up to you guys to come up with your own abilities, and for us it's just much more fun like that. It's cool watching what people do.
What we used to do and what other platformers used to do is to offer you a complex challenge, but only really offer you a limited solution to it. The only real way you can complete the challenges is to do it exactly as the designer intended. What we've tried to do here is turn that on its head - we're offering simple challenges, but we're giving the player complete control over how they go about doing them. And for us that offers a huge amount of replayability, because you'll want to go back to the challenges with new components, new ideas and try and tackle them in a different way.
Gregg Mayles, Creative Director
Gregg Mayles: It began as a reworking of the first Banjo game. Then Conker: Live & Reloaded came out and didn’t have the reception we’d hoped. It made us take a second look. User-generated content was the big new buzzword, and so we were wondering if we could put some of the design in the players’ hands.
Rare Revealed: The Making of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
Steve Malpass, Level Designer
Ryan Stevenson, Concept Artist
Gregg Mayles, Creative Director
Ed Bryan, Character Artist
Gregg Mayles: We were actually going to change things about the game as you played.
Steve Malpass: It got as far as taking Mumbo’s Mountain, the first level from Banjo-Kazooie and all the puzzles and tasks in that level we would see how we could adapt them.
Gregg Mayles: Conga was going to be kind of aware that you’d already fought previously and was going to behave differently. We were really concerned that trying to get the message of this is not just a reskin or it’s the old game with new graphics and we felt it might be a hard sell and players were expecting a new game.
Steve Malpass: That changed the direction into what became kind of a banjo versus grunty idea.
Ryan Stevenson: Banjo and Grunty in the same level trying to do the same task.
Gregg Mayles: Grunty would be controlled by AI would be going around collecting the notes and the jiggies and so would banjo.
Steve Malpass: She’d also be in the level doing stuff, trying to interfere with your progress it was quite complicated actually.
Gregg Mayles: The level of complexity of the AI was kind of prohibitive, we could foresee it was going to be really challenging to get the level of AI so we kind of decided that wasn’t for us.
Ed Bryan: Other thing that people always wanted to do was a game where you could build stuff the next idea was looking at kind of how players moved around in platform games.
Steve Malpass: Tim Stamper had the idea of an interactive lego set.
Gregg Mayles: How can we make the traveling to the objective as fun as getting to the objective itself?
Steve Malpass: So we put together a prototype of being able to use these in these blocks and make different vehicles.
Ryan Stevenson: The player was going to make these objects themselves.
Ed Bryan: And it grew from there into Nuts & Bolts.
Ed Bryan: The art style kind of evolved. We tried doing high proper res characters but always felt like they kind of lacked the charm that we’ve got with the original game and the original characters.
Ryan Stevenson: Ed had the suggestion of making it all cuboid like upresed low poly models so we ended up with kind of these smooth surfaces but still retaining what the original looked like.
Ed Bryan: We introduced kind of having this kind of hard edge look to the character so they were smoother but they still had this kind of crisp edges that the original characters had and that we felt that worked much better that fitted very well with the kind of the mechanics that were being introduced into the game.
Rare at the Herbert: "Tales From Twycross" Developer Panel
Gregg Mayles, Creative Director
How and why did Banjo-Threeie turn from a straight sequel to Nuts & Bolts?
Gregg Mayles: Pretty much because I got bored doing the previous formula. We done obviously the first game and the second game was more of the same but kinda bigger and cleverer. I just didn’t feel like I had anywhere left to go by doing a third one exactly the same. So we started exploring different, what could we do differently for a third game that would catch people by surprise. Shape-shift the genre up a bit.
The first idea was to actually do a remake of Banjo, 1 but then change the gameplay so when you started the game is made it look like it was exactly the same game but with better graphics but then the more you played we’d actually change things that happened in the level. Like the first level with Mumbo’s Mountain the mountain would break open with a massive termite coming out that top. So players that played it before it was like the same game but it’s different but ultimately we were concerned that it would be seen as a remake even if it was clever.
Then we started dabbling with an idea where it was more traditional Banjo game but the player played it the same time as Grunty and Grunty was ai, but she’d be running around levels trying to collect the jigsaws at the same time. So it was almost like a battle between you playing banjo and grunty as ai but we turned that one down because the problem with ai is we didn’t think we could make ai that good enough to warrant a game.
So kind of third time looking was kinda looking at old platform game and doing the puzzles and the fun bits, I call them. But the inbetween bits were kinda boring just walking around on levels, I would just call it the traveling. So we looked for a way to make the traveling fun, but instead of walking what if the character rode? So I tried to make the traveling fun and wanted players to decide how they were gonna travel and that’s the creation of vehicles so yeah that’s kinda where it came from.
24:02 / 43:02 Interview With The Creator of Banjo Kazooie - Steve Mayles (EXCLUSIVE)
Steve Mayles, Character Artist
Banjo Threeie (...) what happened? Why was it cancelled?
Steve Mayles: It wasn’t cancelled it came out didn’t it? It was called Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (...) It was a shame it wasn’t the Banjo game that people wanted but I think we very much thought that we had to try something new for the Xbox market. I think if we would’ve stayed with Nintendo I think we would have probably done a Banjo-Threeie very much in the vein as the other games but I think there very much the thought that we can’t just do that anymore and again it comes back to the team especially the design team wanting to do something a bit different, not wanting to know churn out the same experience again and again.
But I mean looking back I think the original idea for the game I think we’d called it was sort of a codenamed Banjo-X at that time. So this is like this would be after Grabbed by the Ghoulies so this is sort of, let’s say, early 2004. By the time we started looking at it and I remember the team was never particularly big there, and it never seemed to be a few people on it and then to me there never seemed to be a big push on it really. I don’t think we knew where it was going to go.
We tried a few things an initial idea was to go back to the original worlds and they’re all destroyed and stuff but we didn’t really feel that was gonna work, cause it would be just as much work to do those worlds destroyed. For us to do brand new worlds and I’m sure people in much prefer brand new worlds. Well you know old rehashed worlds.
And then we had another thing going where it was going to be like a four-player thing whether it was online or like in a local multiplayer I can’t remember but the idea was you’d control 4 Banjo’s this was an interesting concept and be like so you’d be able to stack the Banjos on top of easy other and they’d be able to help each other up two ledges which sounds completely over-ambitious now talking about it and I think there was going to be some competition with Grunty so there was Grunty you know the Banjos were trying to win something and Grunty was in a competition at the same time. I think that was the idea and we’ve done a few characters. I think, I’ve put a few out over the years on like Twitter and stuff. We’ve done a few characters but it really wasn’t going anywhere and the team was scaled back and then the team was split up with most of the team going on to make Viva Pinata because that had a very definite direction it was going in.
Then at that point for probably a year, you know, Banjo it had a sort of a skeleton staff on it really there was maybe only one or two people on it because most people gone onto pinata and even I did six months of work on pinata because the Banjo gaming was not going anywhere.
Then around what would be probably sometime in 2006 there was an idea probably from Tim and Gregg about I think Tim had an idea of like building stuff from blocks and stuff but I still think the base idea is really good I’m just not sure it was right for a Banjo game.
I think as a standalone game the concept is really good and probably ahead of its time it was probably more than the hardware could cope with at the time as well. I know we struggled a little bit with frame rate. But we you know bought into this new direction and it seemed like it would be you know the right thing to do but of course when it came out people just didn’t see it the same way as they were very disappointed but I wonder you know there was a traditional Banjo-Threeie game coming out on Xbox, I’m not sure it would have sold very well I think the home for that sort of game is always going to be Nintendo.
