The bear and the bird are finally home. You might have expected that Banjo-Kazooie would get a PC version somewhere in the last 20 years given that Windows purveyor Microsoft acquired Rare in 2002, but alas, it’s remained stranded on Xbox consoles and the original Nintendo 64 all this time. As they have done with other N64 favorites before, recompilation mad lad Wiseguy and co. are here to save the day.
Yesterday, a trailer for Banjo: Recompiled went up on YouTube seemingly out of nowhere and with it, a full native port of the original Banjo-Kazooie for Windows, Linux, and Mac was shared on GitHub along with its source code. You’ll need to bring your own game files, but plug the ROM in and it just works. It’s remarkably crisp and feature-rich, offering a superior experience to emulation while demanding less from your computer.
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Some of those features include support for higher framerates, widescreen and ultrawide aspect ratios, and an extensive options menu where you can change control mappings and switch to a dual analog camera. You can even borrow the best feature from the Rare Replay version of the game, which lets you hold on to any notes you’ve collected when you leave a level or die. A little lower-stakes than the original, but a welcome time saver.
After fiddling around with it for a few minutes, I was immediately struck by the lack of input lag and uncanny visual clarity. It’s like putting on prescription glasses for the first time. I was impressed by the Mario 64 and Legend of Zelda ports that came before this, but Banjo is a game I have real muscle memory with and a disproportionate fondness for—a release of this caliber is like Christmas morning for me.
But of course, that’s not all. There’s a built-in mod menu with support for the biggest mods around: Mark Kurko’s Zelda-themed Jiggies of Time and N64 mashup Nostalgia 64, as well as an HD texture pack from modder GhostlyDark are all featured in the trailer.
This just keeps happening, and all sorts of other Nintendo 64 games have decompiled versions floating around online, so it feels like it’s only a matter of time before they get recompiled into native ports, too. In the era of Stop Killing Games where an estimated 87% of classic games are no longer playable by normal means, releases like Banjo: Recompiled are a welcome reminder that there are viable means aside from emulation and official ports to keep these games playable. It takes absurd amounts of elbow grease, but the result is something special.
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