Video: Before Banjo-Kazooie was Banjo-Kazooie, it was Dream, an RPG-adventure hybrid that might have been the best-looking Super Nintendo game ever made.
Today on YouTube, Rare released a neat little mini-documentary about Dream, which was pushed from the SNES to the Nintendo 64 before it evolved into the Banjo we all know and love today. You can watch it here:
Cool stuff, although I can’t help but feel bad for Edison. Dude never even got a chance before he was eaten by a bear.
Comments
7 responses to “A Look At Dream, The Unreleased Predecessor To Banjo-Kazooie”
It’s sad to see how Rare was #1 back in the day and now they’re just a shell of their former company.
You can blame Microsoft for that.
Sea of Thieves has potential – and Rare Replay has shown they still have it.
Not sure porting your old, good games count’s as “still having it”
Still have it? Lol. They haven’t made a major title which could be described as anything more than competent in a very long time.
Wow! The snes footage looks amazing. Even better than the n64 in certain regards.
I was just replaying donkey kong country for the umpteenth time recently, and I thought to myself “how amazing would it have been if rare had used the dkc graphics engine on a FF or secret of mana style rpg?”.
Seeing this footage is like a dream come true (except. ..without coming true). Oh, what I’d give to play that alpha footage.
Personally, I’d love to see rare make a current gen game game using a similar graphics style and system. A return to 2D pre-renders would allow certain things, such as extremely complex cloth, hair and water physics, as well as rich particle effects with smoke and fire, and super intricate lighting not possible in realtime. I realize all those things are already achievable to a great extent using 3d engines, so specifically I’m talking about the kind of complexity for the pre-renders that takes a day just to render on a supercomputer.
[For those not familiar with the term pre-render, it means creating a 3d object, then recording a 2D picture of it. Since the drawing of the picture is no more complex than showing a photo, the load on the graphics card is very low, hence how donkey kong country -dkc – managed to look so amazing on the snes.]
Seeing this and some other games from the latest days of the SNES, makes it seems as though switching to polygonal 3D graphics in the next generation was almost a step back. Obviously, 3D had nigh-infinite potential for growth, as it has done through the last couple decades, but I can definitely name several PS1 games that look worse than this unfinished and unpolished SNES prototype.