The Making of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts – Celebrating 15 Years with Xbox Feature

Next up was something of a return to roots that almost started as a remake of another Rare classic. It was time for the studio to return its attention back to a certain bear and bird.
Rare was working on multiple projects at this point, including Viva Pinata sequel Trouble in Paradise and its DS cousin Pocket Paradise (both launched in September 2008). It was also making the Xbox Avatars, which would again arrive during a hectic 2008.
Meanwhile, Gregg Mayles, having worked on Ghoulies and Viva Pinata, was ready to return to the classic N64 series Banjo-Kazooie. And he had an idea of remaking the first game… sort of.
“The remake idea was an interesting one,” he muses. “It was going to be a remake, but different. It was going to look like the original, but different things would happen. So you’d go into the game thinking: ‘I know this. This is Mumbo’s Mountain, and there’s an anthill here and I am going to go inside it and climb up’. But then we’d changed it by the anthill breaking open and this giant ant coming out.
“So you’d think you know what it’s going to be, and it looks like a remake, but its not. But we talked ourselves out of it, because we were worried that we’d do all this work and people might miss what we were trying to achieve. They might just look at it and go: ‘Oh it’s a remake or it’s a re-skin’ and not notice all the differences.”
So the team looked at it again, and pondered how they could reverse another gaming convention and deliver a ‘counter-op’ release.
“The idea was that you would play the world itself, and Gruntilda the Witch was controlled by AI, and you were competing against her for the jiggies,” Mayles clarifies. “So, rather than have her as the end boss, you were constantly playing against her throughout. But we scrapped that because we felt the AI was going to be horrendously complex.
“Then we came up with something completely different, which was Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. I always felt that platform games were fun, but the travelling in them was not so enjoyable.
The idea was that if we could enable players to make their own moves, perhaps they can make the travelling more fun. So the mechanical elements, the blocks and the bits of the vehicles became your moves, which you would combine together. That was the original idea for it.”
It was as far from a remake as you could imagine. Some of Banjo-Kazooie‘s more devoted fans were quick to decry the lack of more traditional platforming elements, but Nuts & Bolts was an excellent Xbox 360 game when it arrived in November 2008. Besides, fans were still treated to a HD Banjo-Kazooie re-release on Xbox Live Arcade just a few weeks later, so they got the best of both worlds.
Outside the gameplay, the other more striking difference about Nuts & Bolts was the game’s block-based visual style.
“Steve Mayles and Ed Bryan had obviously created Banjo and Grunty and all those back in the day, and we were talking about how we could make a high-res blocky character with a modern theme,” states Ryan Stevenson, who served as Nuts & Bolts‘ art director, and reveals the original ‘demake’ idea did make it through to the game.
“That’s the reason Banjo looks the way he does. He’s harking back to how he looked on the N64, but just with more polygons. So we gave him that ‘cubey’ look, which worked with the whole thing of contraptions made of blocks that fitted together. So really, we just ran with that idea; that everything could be chunky and cubey and mechanical.”
A construction through blocky cubes? It sounds like another game that Microsoft just so happened to acquire.
“Yeah – let’s say that we did that,” Stevenson says with a chuckle. “Let’s say we made Minecraft before it was popular. We didn’t, but let’s say that anyway.”