although there is some level of overlap in development, the game that would become Banjo-Kazooie started it's development on the SNES as a game called Project Dream. At some point Rare realized they were having trouble making an RPG and the main character they had set aside for said RPG was really super milquetoast, but they really liked the bear side character, and that's how they decided to give up on that and use many of the assets they had already created and remold them into 3D Platformer stages. 12 tales: Conker's Adventure, Banjo, and DK64 were all in the cooker at that same time,a ll getting delays for some reason or another.

It's also been revealed by Grant Kirkhope when he released 22 songs that were leftover compositions from Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie to his bandcamp that the music for Fungi Forest was originally composed for Banjo-Kazooie, which would confirm the cross-polination that you folks were discussing and confirm that there was a serious level of crossover in the development of these 3 platforming franchises... and the need to use this cut banjo content  that they couldn't even fit into Banjo Tooie probably lead to some of DK64's titanic level of bloat.

also, you're omitting the fact that the DK Arcade port there is on the hardest difficulty switch and that you get 1 life, where the getting booted out of the mini-game thing is exhaserbated because of the fact that playing the game involves using DK's lever pulling ability, which has a long animation of Donkey Kong kinda cracking his knuckles before laboriously pulling this lever and flopping onto his ass before they even let you back to the title screen of the game. beating a loop of DK in 1 life on this difficulty is about as frustrating as the heartburn one gets after going on a Billy Mitchell hot sauce bender.

Yeah, I know about the early Dream stuff, but I didn't really think about it at the time. The main development of BK would have been started later anyway Im guessing.


Apparently Fungi Forest was a BK level that was left over, so they made some changes and put it in DK64. I thought it was an ok level, but I didn't really like the day/night thing.


We probably should have gone a little deeper with the arcade stuff. Yeah, its kinda annoying you have to complete it twice. The second time through is the hard difficulty. I actually didn't have a super hard time doing it. I probably made it in under an hour all up, or just a little over. The animations were really annoying though, but I did touch on that in a more general sense.


As an aside, I finished the game the day after recording this. I found the end boss to be kinda cool, but it was annoying. Lanky's section was hardest for me, I failed on that a bunch.