Super Nintendo Entertainment System / Nintendo 64 · 1996 · Rare · Nintendo · Eventually Released
Project Dream was Rare's original SNES RPG concept featuring a boy named Edison, which migrated to the N64 over several years and underwent such fundamental redesign that its final protagonist — a bear named Banjo — became the lead of an entirely different game: Banjo-Kazooie.
Project Dream began development at Rare around 1994 as a Super Nintendo RPG. The game's original protagonist was a young boy named Edison who embarked on a fairy-tale adventure, and the gameplay was conceived as an action-RPG drawing on the tradition of Nintendo's own genre titles. Early concept art and design documents show a game with a storybook aesthetic quite different from anything in Rare's released catalogue — more Zelda than Donkey Kong Country in tone and structure. As development progressed, the project migrated platforms. The N64's capabilities made the SNES version seem technically limited for what the team wanted to achieve, and development shifted to N64 hardware. The protagonist also changed: Edison was replaced by various designs as the team searched for a character with the right combination of visual appeal and gameplay functionality. The game's genre shifted away from RPG toward platformer as the team's experience with Donkey Kong Country's 3D graphics influenced the direction. The most significant character redesign came when the team introduced a bear character. The bear — initially called Banjo — had a more distinctive silhouette and movement vocabulary than Edison had allowed. The game's structure, story, and tone shifted around the new character. By the time the game shipped as Banjo-Kazooie in 1998, virtually nothing remained of Project Dream beyond the development team and, arguably, a commitment to fairytale whimsy. The bear-and-bird-in-backpack duo were so different from the original concept that calling Banjo-Kazooie a modified version of Project Dream understates the transformation. Project Dream represents a category of cancellation that is really creative evolution rather than failure: the original game did not ship not because it was bad or abandoned but because the development process produced something better and different. The SNES RPG that Edison starred in was never completed; the N64 platformer that replaced it was one of the most celebrated games of its era.
The transformation of Project Dream from SNES RPG to N64 platformer is one of the more dramatic creative evolutions in Rare's history. The studio had the unusual situation of working simultaneously on the N64 hardware platform with Donkey Kong Country's pre-rendered graphics experience and on a game whose original conception predated both. The visual and technical possibilities that N64 development opened up — polygonal characters, true 3D environments, camera systems that could follow a character through three-dimensional space — were incompatible with the design assumptions of an SNES action-RPG.p>
Edison's replacement was gradual rather than decisive. Concept art from the transition period shows various character designs that occupy the space between the boy-protagonist and the eventual bear — iterations that tried to find a character whose visual design translated effectively to 3D polygon rendering while retaining some of the original game's storybook quality. The bear's simple, readable silhouette worked in 3D in a way that human character designs typically struggled to achieve with the polygon counts available in the mid-1990s.
Banjo-Kazooie (1998) was received as one of the N64's landmark platformers — a game that matched and in some ways surpassed Super Mario 64's design achievements while carving out a distinct tonal identity. The game's whimsy, its witty dialogue, and its bear-and-bird dynamic were exactly the characteristics that Project Dream's designers had originally been trying to capture with Edison in a different format. The creative instincts that drove the original SNES design survived the platform migration and genre shift; the specific game they had originally been attached to did not.
The relationship between Project Dream and Banjo-Kazooie illustrates a principle that game development histories occasionally demonstrate: the most valuable output of a cancelled project is sometimes not the game itself but the design thinking that was refined during its development. The Rare team that worked on Project Dream between 1994 and 1997 was developing the aesthetic sensibility and the character design vocabulary that would make Banjo-Kazooie distinctive. Project Dream was the education; Banjo-Kazooie was the application.