Prerelease:Banjo-Pilot
This page details prerelease information and/or media for Banjo-Pilot.
Banjo-Pilot is notorious for having undergone a rather extensive development phase, and by far one of the longest for a Game Boy Advance game. It started as Diddy Kong Pilot, a sequel to the classic 1997 Nintendo 64 racer Diddy Kong Racing, before undergoing several complete reworks and coming out as a Banjo-Kazooie spin-off in 2005.
Development Timeline
2000
- Unknown date - Development begins as Diddy Kong Pilot.
- August 24-26 - Footage of Diddy Kong Pilot was shown off at Space World 2000, though it was not officially announced.
2001
- May 16 - Nintendo announces the game at E3 2001.
- August 24-26 - Diddy Kong Pilot is present at Space World. Around this time, Nintendo begins to become concerned over the game's quality, singling out the tilt controls and lack of a 3D world, but instead of canceling it, Rare mandates that the game be finished by October.
- September 7 - The 2001 Diddy Kong Pilot prototype is built.
- October - The designer and the artists are replaced. The process of removing the adventure elements and tilt controls are completed.
- October 9 - Nintendo dates Diddy Kong Pilot for March 4, 2002.
2002
- Unknown date - Rare submits Diddy Kong Pilot to Nintendo for approval, but it is rejected over quality concerns; Reasons given included there being no point in flying up and down on flat levels. Some employees believed that Nintendo was just being prejudiced against the company, since it occurred in a time period just before the Microsoft acquisition.
- March 4 - The game misses its release date. It has not been canceled but is being reworked from the ground up.
- March 20[1] - The rumors of Microsoft's acquisition of Rare begin.
- May-June - The new team spends these months building a new version of the game.
- September 24 - Microsoft acquires Rare, but the Diddy Kong Pilot team continues work on the game, assuming they will be unaffected since Microsoft is allowing Rare to continue developing Game Boy Advance games.
2003
- February 19 - The 2003 Diddy Kong Pilot prototype is built.
- Unknown date - The decision is made to still release the game but strip it of the Donkey Kong license.
- July 3 - Microsoft registers the trademark for Banjo-Pilot.
2004
- April 21 - THQ releases the first screenshots of Banjo-Pilot, which has been rebuilt from the ground up with an engine that renders tracks using voxels.
- June 10 - The 2004 voxel engine prototype is built. After this, the team is ordered to scrap the voxel engine due to problems with lag, even though one developer recalled that it only needed a month before entering QA.
- Unknown date - After scrapping the voxel engine, the team reskinned the 2003 Diddy Kong Pilot prototype, with five months spent making changes and fixing bugs.[2]
- September 29 - A near-final prototype, reskinning the 2003 Diddy Kong Pilot prototype into a Banjo-Kazooie game, is built.
2005
- January 12 - Banjo-Pilot is released in North America.
- February 18 - Banjo-Pilot is released in Europe.
Space World 2000
Footage of Diddy Kong Pilot was shown off during Space World 2000, though before its official announcement at E3 2001. What's notable about this footage is that it comes from when Mario characters were planned to be playable and shows them in action. The Mario characters had been removed by the time of E3 2001, though some resources remain within the post-Space World prototype.
E3 2001
Screenshots
These screenshots come from Nintendo's official E3 2001 press kit. They have been converted from TIF to PNG.
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