Joshua Robertson is a News Editor for TheGamer. When not writing about breaking news, community stories, or covering industry events, you can find him begging FromSoftware for a Bloodborne remaster.
There are plenty of things I’ll never forgive Xbox for. Buying up promising studios like Rare and Obsidian and never doing anything with them, normalizing having to pay subscription fees to access online services, ruining Game Pass, laying off thousands upon thousands of people, the list truly does just keep going and going.
On the purely gaming side of things, though, one of the worst and most baffling things that Xbox has done over the past decade is that it has never done anything with Banjo-Kazooie. You have to go all the way back to 2008 for the last Banjo-Kazooie game in the series, and that was Nuts Bolts, which was pretty good in my opinion, but nowhere near a standard Banjo-Kazooie experience.
Ever since, the series has been practically on ice, with neither Xbox nor Rare giving us any hints about whether our favorite bear and his loudmouthed sidekick have any chance of returning. It has studios willing to do it, with both Crash developer Toys For Bob and Ori developer Moon Studios both willing and keen, but we’ve heard pretty much nothing official just yet.
Banjo-Kazooie Fan Creates Their Own Game In Dreams
Thankfully, we’ve seen time and time that fans of series will go out of their way to do what big developers and publishers won’t, and Banjo-Kazooie is no exception. Announced earlier this week, a Twitter user by the name of Eupholace shared that a Banjo-Kazooie level that they made in Dreams on PS4 is now available to play, and from the footage they showed off, it looks pretty incredible.
This Banjo-Kazooie is called Banjo-Kazooie: Mumbomania, and all you’ll need to do to actually play it is just grab a copy of Dreams and search for the name. Sadly, it is just a single level rather than a full-fledged game, but it’s a pretty sizable one, housing a whopping 30 different Jiggys to collect compared to the average 10 that you’d find in a proper Banjo-Kazooie level.
Eupholace also explained that it took them a grand total of 14 months for them to make this one level, so if you rinse it as fast as possible, don’t go expecting to find any more levels any time soon. Apparently, the level should last you between one and two hours to 100 percent complete, so take your time and savor it.
At the very least, it’s essentially a modern Banjo-Kazooie from an unofficial source, and I’ll take that at this point. If you’re worried about either Xbox or Rare getting a bit antsy and going after Eupholace, you don’t have to. Earlier this week, Rare itself acknowledged Eupholace’s impressive creation on the studio’s official Twitter account, saying that it put on its “fanciest hat on just so we could tip it to this.” Now all we need to do is convince Rare to make another one.
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