The History of Banjo-Tooie

Development began in June 1998, directly on the heels of Banjo-Kazooie, and the design brief was expansion in every direction. The worlds interconnect: a train, the Chuffy, carries the pair between levels, and puzzles reach across world boundaries. Banjo and Kazooie can split up and work separately, aiming switches to first-person view. Mumbo Jumbo becomes playable in the field while a new character, Humba Wumba, takes over the transformations. A four-player multiplayer suite rides along. Grant Kirkhope, with twice the cartridge memory for audio, could now crossfade two full MIDI arrangements as the player moved, the vertical-remixing idea from the first game given room to breathe.

The cutting floor is documented with unusual honesty. A whole castle world was dropped, its assets recycled into Cauldron Keep. A mode called Bottles' Revenge, in which a second player possessed an undead Bottles and controlled the enemies against player one, worked rather well by the team's account; it was cut because possessing bosses could not be debugged in time, and the idea later resurfaced in Perfect Dark's Counter-Operative mode. Reviewers praised the scale and the graphics and marked the frame rate down for inconsistency, the tax the ambition paid on 1998 hardware asked to run a 2000 game.

Tooie also inherited the first game's famous unfinished business. Stop 'n' Swop, the cartridge-swapping secret the hardware would not support, is honoured here in miniature: three eggs and the Ice Key hidden inside the game itself, waiting to be found rather than transferred. The full story of why the original plan failed is on this shelf's Stop 'n' Swop page, filed under Banjo-Kazooie, where the tease began.