Does Rare’s Project Dream Exist In Some Form?
Back when Rare had just started working as Nintendo’s second party and were racking up recognition with Killer Instinct and the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, they secretly began plans for their most ambitious title to date, which went by the codename “Project Dream.” Little is known about the game, how it would have played or what storyline it would have contained, but we do know the main character (a boy named Edison, who carried a wooden sword) and the game’s villain, which would have been a pirate named Captain Blackeye. As the SNES limped toward retirement, Rare shifted the project to the N64, and somewhere between then and the summer of 1997 a secondary character named Banjo the Bear stole the lead role from Edison and the game’s theme changed entirely. That became Banjo-Kazooie, which saw release in 1998. Always self-referential, Rare put Captain Blackeye in the back room of a bar in Banjo-Tooie, drinking his sorrows away with ginger beer and lamenting “I had a dream….I were in this