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Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts interview

8-Sep-2008 Rare's Neill Harrison and Elissa Miller talk Banjo, platforming and future plans...

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Once a treasured part of the Nintendo 64 line-up, since those days Banjo has come a long way. Erm, baby.

Not only is Banjo now found kicking back on Microsoft's Xbox 360 these days but he's even ditched his old platforming shoes for a new mechanical DIY flavour, where he crafts bizarre and weird vehicles to help him reach the places that used to demand a double-jump.

Why the change in direction? Did Rare expect the initial negativity from Banjo fans? What changed to help them overcome it? OXM talks to technical lead artist Neill Harrison and senior animator Elissa Miller to find out the answers.

I'm assuming you're pretty close to being gold and out the door now.
NH: Pretty close, yeah.

So how does that feel?
EM: Good.
NH: Great, yeah. It's just good to get the franchise back and hopefully people are quite excited about it. We've quite a good buzz around from the old fans and new fans who are quite happy to see Banjo back. So that's really cool.

Have you fulfilled your original vision for the game?
NH: Yeah, I think we've fulfilled what we wanted to do. What we didn't want to do was to just do another Banjo Kazooie which was exactly the same and that's actually we started doing at the beginning. We thought well, we'll just do another platform game as Banjo Kazooie. We did that for a bit and as gamers and as developers, it just felt a little bit stale. It felt like it didn't fit in today's market. With the 360, there's just so much more we can do, we thought we'd try something different.

Were you worried about the reaction from Banjo fans?
EM: There are always concerns. We wanted to make a game that was innovative, basically. We just thought with the old games, platforming had hit its peak. If we had rehashed and done another platformer, people would have moaned at us for doing that. So we thought we'd do something innovative and something pushing gaming. We're hoping old Banjo fans will really enjoy it and we think they will.
NH: I'm pretty confident they will when they play it. It's just that whole thing of they have to give it a chance.
EM: People are always resistant to change. I think like Neill says, once you pick it up and have a play around with it, you'll realise why we made those changes and we actually needed to make the changes to the Banjo franchise.

You say that it felt stale doing a Banjo platformer. Is that just a feeling within Rare or just how you think things are in today's market where a platformer wouldn't fit?
NH: Both. As developers, we didn't just want to do the same game for three years. I'd rather do something different. But also in today's market, I think if we'd have done Banjo Kazooie with high-def visuals, it maybe would have felt just a bit dated really. And it's like, why not try something different? As an industry, I think it's important that people try new things. Obviously it's a big financial risk for everyone involved and so on but if we don't do that as an industry, we'll become stale.
EM: Rare are always wanting to try new things as well. We're quite lucky to be in that position where we can and so for us, it was really important to try something new and not get caught up in the rehashing of franchises one after the other.
NH: It is important that we still see it very much as a Banjo game. Initially some people thought it was a Banjo game with racing tacked on, which it absolutely isn't. It is at its heart still a Banjo game. The way we think of it is it's still a platformer, essentially. It's just that instead of us telling you how you're going to do a level - jump here, swim there - it's now up to you to choose how to do it.

With you pushing Banjo in a whole new direction, what is it that keeps it a Banjo game?
EM: There's still a platform element. In Showdown Town where you collect the notes and the Jiggies, there still are platform elements.
NH: The whole concept of winning tickets, competing against Grunty, that's all there. The familiar characters, the humour...
EM: The humour is a big thing.
NH: ...the sarcastic comebacks and so on. That's all still there. Like Elissa says there are platform elements. You've still got the jumping and the attacking, ladders, tightropes, all that sort of stuff. So that's all very much Banjo. Also Gregg Mayles is actually the designer on the team. He's our design director. He designed the original two Banjo games. So what's funny is some people turn round to us and say "well, this isn't a Banjo game." And it's like well, Gregg designed the first two and he designed this one so if anyone knows what makes a Banjo game, it's Gregg.

It's interesting from an art design aspect, how you decided what made it a Banjo game. You've now got a larger budget, a fully orchestrated soundtrack, you could have had voice actors... where did you restrain yourself?
EM: I did quite a lot of voices for the characters [laughs] That's kind of like a Rare thing, try and make it as funny as possible.
NH: That was a big decision, whether to have audio voice for the characters or to keep the jibber jabber from the old games. We kind of ummed and aahed about it and we were thinking quite a lot... if we just keep text, people will think we've done that because we couldn't be bothered to do the audio or couldn't afford to do the audio. In the end, we decided to keep the text because Gregg felt that was a very important part of the Banjo franchise.
EM: Because it's quite easy to get swayed by the money and make it next-gen. Obviously it is next-gen but little things like that keep it grounded and to the Banjo roots.
NH: From a visual point of view, the old Banjo games were always quite colourful so we've kept that theme going. We've probably, in some respects, made it a little less colourful because people might otherwise dismiss it as a kid's game because it's bright and colourful. But it's still very, very bright and vibrant.

Where did the decision to put old Banjo Kazooie on Xbox Live come from?
NH: Don't know. To be honest, I don't know where the idea came from, whether it came from within Microsoft or within Rare. But we're quite happy about it because it just hopefully regenerates the franchise somewhat. There are still a lot of people who want to play the old game. It is ten years old but it dates quite well, actually. If you play it, it's now in HD and actually runs at a decent frame rate [laughs] so on an HD telly it looks pretty bloody good. But where the decision came from, I'm not entirely sure. And Stop 'N Swap was a hark back to the old fans. It's bit of a joke, really. If one game detects the other on your hard drive, it'll unlock some stuff.
EM: It gives you more components, things like that.

Last time I saw it, it was branded up with Nintendo stuff and I heard that's not there anymore?
EM: In the game?

Yeah, in the old game.
NH: In the old game, branded up as Nintendo? I don't know to be honest.

It had Banjo playing his Gameboy...
NH: I can't really comment on the legal issues but Banjo is our IP and I think if it was in the old game, then I think we're okay to use it. But we've certainly got the legal people to go through it. They've taken out things that we're not allowed to keep. We just do what we're told [laughs]

With all the vehicle customisation, how hard was it to balance it so the challenges weren't too easy?
NH: Well, the way it works is when you first start the game, you have a very small subset of components. There's 100-odd but you might only have 10 or 15 because if we gave you all 100 at the beginning, especially younger players, they wouldn't know what they're doing. So you start off with those and as you progress, along Showdown Town you get these crates with components in with these new components in.
EM: And you unlock blueprints.
NH: Yeah. So it's not until later on when you can have all the jets.
EM: So when I made a vehicle, I had unlocked all the components, so I had everything unlocked when I was showing you [there was a brief demo prior to the interview]
NH: The cool thing is you can then go back to the older challenges. In the first challenge in the game, you simply get from A to B within the time limit and you've just got the one vehicle because that's all you can build. But later on, when you've got jets, you can get there in a split-second so you want to go back to the earlier challenges and do them in a completely way.

Was there ever a temptation to create a brand new character and brand new IP?
NH: No. I don't think there was because it always was going to be a Banjo game. It wasn't that we came up with this idea then packed him in. It was always Banjo. I can see what you mean but no, we never really went down that route of going "oh it's a bit different, we should come up with a new character." It was always Banjo.

This must be only the beginning of the Game 3.0 creation process, surely.
EM: We've always looked at it as an introduction to what we could do. If we went on and did some more then we could put pressure, if it was accepted and people enjoyed it, then we could push it in a much bigger direction. So this is an opening for a new type of gaming, I guess.
NH: We did have a few crazy ideas. I'd probably get in trouble if I mentioned some of them but if it was successful, we have loads of ideas for what we can do next in the same sort of context but expanding out.

At the same time, if it massively flops will you go straight back to platforming?
NH: I don't know. I'm not thinking about it.
EM: It won't! [laughs]
NH: I don't know. That would be a decision that would have to be made later on. So far, we do seem to be getting a pretty good reaction. We both went to Leipzig and people's reactions to the demos were really good.
EM: When we first announced it, it was like "oh they've done a racing game", you know? When we demo it and you can play it in multiplayer and build your own vehicles, they realise the breadth of the game and are quite accepting of it.

Were you anticipating that kind of reaction?
EM: Like I said before, when anything will change, people have some sort of reaction to it. So I guess yeah, we were anticipating it. All we could do is just finish the game and do stuff like this to promote it and try and change perception which, thankfully, it seems to have done. People are now very accepting of the brand and the new type of game.

If this new direction does turn out to be a huge success, is it a case of re-inventing the wheel again?
EM: Like I said before, probably just expand on it.
NH: Probably... expand on it [laughs] People always ask us what we're going to do next. Have a holiday [laughs]
EM: We get two weeks off, so we'll come back and see what happens!

Ryan King