At the end of the second Banjo Kazooie game, Banjo-Tooie, Gruntilda the witch vowed to exact her revenge in Banjo-Threeie.
Even though developer Rare eventually released a third installment, 2008’s Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, the Xbox game’s drastic departure from the Collect-a-Thon model proved polarizing to say the least. To this day, die-hard fans of the series hold out hope for a true trilogy capper to the Bear and Bird saga.
While that probably won’t be happening anytime soon, a new Banjo Kazooie-inspired Geogussr game—Where in Banjo?—has arrived to provide a rush of nostalgia for the golden days of 3D platformers on the Nintendo 64, before Rare was acquired by Microsoft.
An Exclusive Look Inside Banjo-Kazooie Geogussr Game Where in Banjo?
“It was born out of selfishness, because I just wanted a Banjo-Kazooie Geogussr game, and was really surprised it didn’t exist already,” the game’s developer and Banjo-Kazooie super-fan Colton O’Dwyer exclusively told SYFY Wire. “I was doubly surprised because if you’ve ever played Banjo, it kind of exists in the game already in the form of ‘Furnace Fun,’ the little quiz game that Grunty puts you through at the end. She’ll show you an image, ask you where you think it is on the map, and you have to guess.”
And so, just like Thanos (Josh Brolin) at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, O’Dwyer decided, “I’ll just do it myself.” The end result, he added, “ended up getting way more support than I could have ever thought.”
“I posted it on the Banjo-Kazooie subreddit,” he continued. “I didn’t expect anything of it, went to bed, and when I woke up, the post had 75,000 views. The Instagram reel I made had the same amount of views…I had no idea Banjo-Kazooie had this strong of a fan base 28 years later.”
What really helped boost the signal was a retweet by famed Banjo composer, Grant Kirkhope, whom O’Dwyer reveres as “a total legend.”
“Any game developed by Rare has this very sarcastic, sardonic [sense of] humor, which you don’t find in a lot of Mario games,” he elaborated. “I think it’s partially because they’re a British company and have that pretty typical British humor. I thought it was really funny and sarcastic, and the music, for me, is totally what makes it the best game of all time.”
The mechanics of Where in Banjo? are simple. A player is shown a screen-grab from a world in Kazooie, Tooie, or both (you get to choose), and must discern what map it comes from.
“There’s 150 clues for Banjo-Kazooie and 370 for Banjo-Tooie,” revealed O’Dwyer. “I needed to program it to where it wouldn’t show you the same clues if you redo a round, so there’s no repeat images.”
Naturally, Kirkhope’s compositions play a major part in each round.
“The charm about Banjo-Kazooie is that every little zone and sub-zone had a soundtrack,” O’Dwyer reflected. “[Even] if you were underwater, the soundtrack changed. I matched each clue up with the music, exactly where it is in the game. If you haven’t played Banjo-Kazooie in a while, it’s a total wave of nostalgia. And even if you have, I tried to capture that nostalgia with the game, too.”
Every wrong guess causes the still to zoom out, simultaneously giving the player more context, but lessening their chance of scoring more points.
“Getting it right on the first guess is 500 points,” O’Dwyer explained, “second guess is 250, third guess is 100, and then there are no points after that. There’s three tiers. The bronze tier is ‘Bottles Beginner,’ silver tier ‘Banjo Ball Knower’ and golden tier ‘Furnace Fun Fanatic’ 7,500 points and up. Thirty-thousand people have played at least a full match the game, and of those 30,000 games, only 20 percent have been in the final 7,500 point or above.”
Spurred on by the overwhelming positive reaction to the game, O’Dwyer is now in the process of giving Super Mario 64 (the grandaddy of all 3D platformers) the same treatment.
“That’s another game that I have so much love and nostalgia for,” he concluded. “It lends itself very well to a game like this. It’ll probably be a couple weeks, but if people are Super Mario 64 fans, there will also be a WhereinMario.com. Don’t even try to steal the domain from me…I already bought it.”
