Banjo-Kazooie Was Fantastic–And It Doomed 3D Platformers

Banjo-Kazooie is celebrating its 25-year anniversary today, June 29, 2023. Below, we look back at how it created the model for bad habits that would ultimately hurt the genre.

Perhaps only second to Super Mario 64 in the N64’s litany of excellent platformers, Banjo-Kazooie combines the wide-open levels of its genre’s 3D progenitor with a loveable cast of characters, a great art-style, and–perhaps most importantly–an even bigger variety of stuff to collect. Unfortunately, that’s also where the problems begin: Though Banjo-Kazooie found the perfect balance for the collect-a-thon formula, Rare’s later follow-ups failed to balance the scales. Those games would essentially kill one of the most popular genres of its era by growing too big and too tedious for its own good.

Rare has one of the best libraries of any game developer of the ’90s and ’00s, so it can be difficult to narrow down which ones are the best outright. That said, you could make an argument that Banjo-Kazooie represents the developer at the height of its powers, at least as far as 3D platformers go. (I’m throwing you a bone here, GoldenEye fans.)

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