Banjo Pilot

Development

Banjo Pilot was originally going to be called Diddy Kong Pilot and feature characters from the Donkey Kong Country series of games. Due to the Microsoft buyout of Rare in 2002, the Donkey Kong license was dropped and replaced with the Banjo-Kazooie license, which is owned by Rare. Ironically, the character of Banjo originally appeared in the Nintendo 64 racing game Diddy Kong Racing, of which Diddy Kong Pilot was going to be a pseudo-sequel to.

Engine

Rareware experimented with an Mode-7 Voxel Engine for a short duration during the change from Diddy Kong Pilot to Banjo Pilot. The hardware-pressurising graphics engine rendered realistic but slightly jagged 3D environments by analysing the level's height-map and extruding the now-flat Mode-7 terrain upwards, creating the illusion of valleys, etc. However, after releasing a batch of screenshots featuring the engine, Rareware decided to revert to the previous flat landscapes, as once they had added the various level elements, the frame rate took a considerable nose-dive.

Tilt feature

When Banjo-Pilot was still Diddy Kong Pilot, it was going to feature a tilt sensor similar to the Game Boy Color game Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble. This feature was also dropped - Rare's official reason is that trying to play the game on the original, non-backlit Game Boy Advance was incredibly difficult, due to the player's loss of natural light as they tilted their system around. Another possible reason is that it was dropped due to the cost of the more expensive manufacture price of tilt-sensitive cartridges. The type of sensor that was going to be used in Diddy Kong Pilot has not been used since Tilt 'n' Tumble. Games that use a tilt sensor now, such as WarioWare Twisted!, use a simplified version of the sensor, that only allows for left and right movement. It does not detect up and down