Before Banjo-Kazooie, Rare was working on an RPG for the Super Nintendo: Project Dream. After development began around 1995, they considered it too ambitious for the console and ended up developing a version for the Nintendo 64. In the end, though, they also scrapped that version. But from the ashes of this game came both Banjo-Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day; the former thanks to Banjo being a supporting character in the game, the latter by taking elements from the game and turning it into a platformer.
A lost game, found
Now, thirty years later, it seems that a playable version of this video game, which was considered lost, has finally been found. A user identified as FVCKPhil&Asha has uploaded videos of the game running on original hardware, a Super Nintendo, while also uploading a fully functional ROM to Internet Archive. And while its legitimacy still can’t yet be confirmed with total certainty, since they won’t say how they got the game, it seems to be real.
FVCKPhil&Asha has stated that they have strong reasons for making this game public now and not before. “With the current state of the industry and Microsoft’s current soulless dismantling and mismanagement of Rare and other companies it controls, and given how much time has passed, I feel it’s more important to make sure this is properly preserved, and that the ROM is analyzed by people with much more knowledge of how to do this kind of thing”. They also wanted to make a political statement by releasing this game that was thought to be lost
Available for download, as mentioned, on Internet Archive, this is great news for video game preservation. However, we’ll still have to wait for experts to confirm the game’s authenticity and, more importantly, whether it’s playable enough to enjoy.
