“Banjo’s new look is meant to be self-referential”
A literal cubic blast to the past
Before Nuts & Bolts caused major dividing points between the Banjo fans of yesteryears in the form of customizable vehicles, the first cause of division were the blocky graphics first seen at X06 almost two years ago. An early explanation as to why the graphics changed came from Loveday himself in the August 2007 edition of Scribes: “when you see the rest of the game and what it’s about, the look will make more sense.” When we did see the look, Gregg Mayles chimed in through the form of the chat and proclaimed that as with Viva Piñata, he wanted a different look. They always said the third time’s the charm; what does Rare’s charming community manager, George Kelion, have to say about the graphical style that hasn’t been said?
“Banjo’s new look is meant to be self-referential,” explained Kelion in the official Xbox forums. “Videogames have developed their own visual language – from the pixels of 8-bit gaming, through the parallax backgrounds of 16-bit to the blocky, low-poly designs of 32 and 64 bit gaming. We reckon it’s fun (and a little bit cool) to purposefully incorporate and celebrate these themes as an artistic endeavour.”
In addition, Steve Mayles, brother of Gregg and lead creative artist, had this to say: “We went down the normal route of adding more polygons, smoothing things off, but in the process lost some of the strong form of the N64 characters so we made a conscious effort to retain an angular look, even exaggerating it in places, that in turn echoes the angular, blocky construction of the vehicles,” said Mayles.
As someone who got over the new look very soon, what those two said actually makes sense. If you go back and play the N64 versions, you see that their looks were blocky due to the limitation of the hardware. For them to continue that “blocky” look for the sake of similarity to the original games with a touch of nostalgia is absolutely fine by me.
Somehow related news
- Nuts & Bolts and Banjo-Kazooie XBLA out now ()
- Rare comments on what we expected Stop ‘n’ Swop to be ()
- DKC3 is released for the third time ()
- Perfect Dark XBLA releasing “Early Winter 2010” ()
- Rare acknowledges their struggle to find the right audience on Xbox ()
4 Comments
The look’s really grown on me. The actual in-game model really does look like a bulked up version of the original N64 character model.
Same goes for the game’s levels that seem to have a hand-made appearance – they echoe the old N64 visuals. I think people were hoping the worlds would more resemble the old renders, which were more ‘naturalistic’ in feel. Pretty much like DKC, I guess.
Props to the Banjo Team on the unique style that the building blocks that form the vehicles have, too! Just as you’d recognise a Lego block, I’d easily recognise the style of these if they were real-life parts I could buy and assemble.;)
Comment by SummerSky — 23.May.08 @ 11:14 pm
Well… i like the new look from banjo!
Banjo have a great new Restyle.
yea, the whole blocky look is cool to me. looking at the box of Banjo Kazooie Gruntys revenge and Banjo Pilot something just didn’t seem right. the look definetly screams “old days” and N64… as for the gameplay, im still yet to be sold. cars in a banjo game? no use of kazooie and no move sets? cough cough lego cars… yea things evolve but yikes! thats alot of change.. for better? for worse?… we’ll see when the game comes out…….
Comment by Billy — 23.May.08 @ 5:38 am