Over the past 15 or so years, Banjo Kazooie fans have been left waiting in vain for another new entry in the series to make an appearance.
There's been the occasional bit of good news to make things more "bear-able" during this long wait, of course, such as Banjo & Kazooie coming to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and the original N64 classic getting reissued on Nintendo Switch Online. But, in 2024, it seems like we're no closer to getting a new entry in the series, with Rare and Microsoft primarily focused on supporting their multiplayer pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves and bringing their next big project Everwild to life.
Luckily, though, for players, there is a pretty incredible fan community of N64 ROM modders out there, who have been hard at work busy building some excellent new adventures featuring the bird and bear. This includes the YouTuber / modder Kurko Mods, who is currently working on a new Banjo Kazooie modification called BK Nostalgia 64.
This new adventure sees the iconic duo visiting locations from other N64 titles including GoldenEye 007, Donkey Kong 64, Yoshi's Story, and Super Mario 64, and even contains a level based on Project Dream (which was an earlier unreleased version of Banjo Kazooie) and Donkey Kong Country 2 (released for the SNES).
From what we've been able to uncover, the mod was first revealed back in July 2021 but was put on hiatus from November 2021 to December 2023. Now, KurkoMods has finally resumed development on it, releasing a new trailer and a launch window for sometime later this year. The new trailer shows Banjo exploring the main hub world, which features representations of each game's N64 cart and will be used to access the different levels. It also gives a glimpse at the design of some of these freshly-implemented worlds.
The game will be playable on N64 emulators upon release, or on real hardware using an Everdrive flash cart.