Weird Mysteries of the Banjo Universe

As you all know, Rare is a videogame company that was once partners with Nintendo, until Nintendo sold them. Right after the sell, Microsoft gobbled them up(they just like to do that). This week, the very first Rare game released under the Microsoft ownership was now sold. On a Nintendo system.
Okay, here's the real deal: Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge was completed under Nintendo ownership, for the GBA, but it was never released, along with a few other games Rare was planning. But Microsoft sees nothing wrong in releasing their own games on the Game Boy...so this was dusted off and finally published. I haven't played it yet, but it made me think...if this hadn't been allowed to sell, it'd become yet another chapter in the Banjo Mystery Files. And there's a lot in that file cabinet...

Now, this was pretty bold, and maybe a first. Here was a game that was flat out-and-out promising you a sequel, as well as suggesting that the sequel would be able to unlock things in the original game somehow. Everyone wondered how, and awaited the release of Banjo-Tooie.

Banjo-Tooie was released in 2000. Nothing happened.

They had found a way to put the items in B-T, but in the weakest way possible. You'd have to find a hidden room where an anthropomorphic Banjo-Kazooie cart was walking around; break it open, and get the item inside. The first game said the secrets would be unlocked in the original, and in fact SHOWED Banjo and Kazooie getting the items IN that game. So, I guess they...were gotten from there................right?

At first glance here, one might assume Rare just promised something it couldn't deliver. But there's more to THIS story, folks. Shortly after the release of B-T, hackers of B-K finally broke through with the locations of the secret items, and the codes to unlock them. Getting the items opened a new menu called "Stop-N-Swop", leaving things open to some speculation....
Despite the fact that "swap" was misspelled, the name seemed to indicate that the original plan was for you to go to this menu, take out your Banjo-Kazooie cart, put in your Banjo-Tooie cart and transfer the items over. OR, Banjo-Tooie might have been originally planned as a "lock-on" cart, like Sonic and Knuckles, where you would plug B-K into it and get the items THAT way. Whichever they had in mind, it's clear old stodgy Nintendo wouldn't allow it and they had to find another way.

And speaking of "another way"...that's how the hackers did it. It turned out there were codes you could enter in the game that could unlock the seven items. They just somehow found out the codes. This must have been their backup plan, and you know, Rare could have used it. OR, they could have...

...used the Controller Pak. The Controller Pak was Nintendo's weaker version of the Memory Card...it plugged into the controller instead of the system, and held extremely little memory. But the hackers did verify that when you got the items in B-K, some kind of data was saved to a Controller Pak if one was in. So, they had a fourth way they could have done this. With all these plans, why did they cop out? Having the two games connected in this way would have been awesome. Rare hasn't provided any answers at all, they've just made us more confused; especially when they did things like THIS:

You're walking around the scenery in Banjo-Tooie, bummed that you can't get the Ice Key and the eggs in the normal way, or find a valid use for them for that matter. Then you go inside a place called Jolly's Cafe and find a large pirate sitting in the back sipping drinks. You realize you've seen his face somewhere before, and then it hits you...he was the pirate depicted on all those paintings on many walls in the Banjo-Kazooie game. Captain Blackeye is his name....
Then things get even more confusing. As you stand there, he arrrs out, "I had a dream...I were in this fine game....a bear stole me treasure! Looked a lot like you, he did!" THEN, if you look around the room he's in...he's got pictures of the areas the secrets were hidden in, hung up on his wall! And he's got the openings that are unlocked by the codes circled!! BUT RARE NEVER RELEASED THE CODES, SO WHAT IS THIS DOING HERE???

I don't know. Logically, none of this has ever made any sense to me. But I'd like to move on, because there's more mysterious weirdness to be found in Banjo-Tooie.

I mentioned before that Rare liked to hide hints on future games in their current ones, starting with B-K. The problem was, when you reveal things that early, they can change. 1999's Donkey Kong 64 had an "audition" segment that suggested Rare would be making the next DK game for the Gamecube. Since Rare ended up leaving Nintendo in 2002, this obviously didn't happen.
But Banjo-Tooie has one more interesting. In the seventh world you can find someone frozen in a block of ice...after unthawing him, he says his name is Sabreman and that he'd been frozen in there since 1984. You take him back to his tent, which has a drawing of a wolf on it...and as he goes to sleep, he says "I wonder what adventures await me...maybe I'll ride a dolphin." He says it again every time you go in that tent.....
"Dolphin" was the word Nintendo had been using to refer to its next console, before it was officially named Gamecube. The whole scene in B-T was a strong hint that Rare had plans to make their first Gamecube game a revival of Sabre Wulf, their hit game from the mid-80's. But a funny thing happened along the way to making that a reality...
Rare's last N64 title was going to be Dinosaur Planet, a game starring two foxlike animal heroes battling on a...dinosaur planet. But N64 sales were really going into the soup at this point, and the decision was made to move the game to the Gamecube. Then Nintendo said, "Hey, that fox there looks a lot like our character Fox McCloud...why not put him in?" They did, and the game became Star Fox Adventures and was delayed even more, and didn't show up until 2002. Rare had probably planned to start on the Gamecube with something small, like Sabre Wulf, and then get more ambitious over the machine's life, similar to what it did on the N64. But now that this was their first title, Sabre Wulf just wouldn't do. They still planned to do it, so the game was moved to the Game Boy Advance.
While THAT was going on, the aforementioned sell-off of Rare was about to become a reality, and a hold was put on all production of future Rare games for Nintendo. Sabre Wulf for GBA was now completed, but it's up to Microsoft to release it. And meanwhile, I got this guy in my Banjo-Tooie cart telling me something else...

Oh yeah, and the same hackers who got the strange B-K stuff also hacked into Banjo-Tooie and found this: a model for a devil version of Bottles the Mole. Bottles dies in the game and is an angel for most of it...when did he become a devil? And why? Or is this Bottles at all? The hackers also found text that indicated a minigame involving "Devil Bottles" was included in the E3 preview of Banjo-Tooie. If so, no reporter gave us any pics of it...

Bonus! Weird Mysteries of the Zelda Universe

I know of other strange things I've found in another game...Ocarina of Time. But I don't know enough to fill a page, so I'll just use this one. If you thought some of the things in Banjo-Tooie were peculiar, just look at what's been found in THIS game. Check out that shot, for example. This is a very rare shot of what kind of file you would be able to create, had the N64 Disk Drive add-on been released in America. If you're wondering why it's greyed out...that's because once you create a "disk file," it can't be accessed without its Ocarina of Time companion disk(and Japan never released that either, so no one had it). And vice versa--if you had the disk in, you'd only be able to play that file. Fascinating, right? By the way, the version of OoT you would have gotten from the disk was eventually released onto Gamecube as a very cool promotional stunt, containing well-rearranged dungeons with lots of new surprises. If you missed it, find something to hit your head on...

Hackers ripping up Ocarina of Time found many other curious things. Like a platform originally near Jabu-Jabu that had a picture of a beta Ocarina on it....and Japanese icons for two items you never had to collect in the final game: the "Ice Medallion" and the "Wind Medallion." Since you got medallions from temples bearing their name and theme, there were two dungeons that weren't finished. Perhaps the "Wind Temple" contained ideas Nintendo later used in "Wind Waker". The "Ice Medallion" is even more interesting, since there is in fact an icy dungeon in this game--but it's only a short, "half-dungeon" and is not one officially. It's obvious what is in the "Ice Cavern" was intended to be part of a larger place, but they decided to make it some kind of side quest once they figured they didn't really need it.

They also found this strange-shaped ice block in the Ice Cavern code, that doesn't appear in the actual game. I had always wondered what it was really for. Then Ocarina of Time was re-released for the Gamecube with rearranged dungeons, and I walked in the Ice Cavern and THERE THE SUCKER WAS. They remembered it! They ended up using it to store a key, I think. I then rushed to some message boards to boast I had found the Weird Ice being used--and nobody listened. Bah.

But my personal favorite video game mystery, from any game, is "L is Real 2041." This plaque was seen on a star statue/fountain in Super Mario 64. Thousands of game nerds tried to figure out exactly what the blurry type said--maybe it was a clue about something, oooohhhhh!! Don't ask, "clue about what." What matters is that it must be a clue, because that's cool. Anyway, the best anyone could do was "L is Real 2041." THEN we all had to waste our time speculating what that meant. Was the L referencing Luigi? What is meant by "Real"?
As if we were asking for more, the exact same plaque then appeared in Ocarina of Time, in the second dungeon. Now we were CERTAIN it meant something. Then someone pointed out that the blur actually said "Eternal Star," because there was a star above the original. And you know, this is probably more likely. But why believe it? "L is real 2041" is COOL, ya know...

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