[GameMaster]

It received a significant amount of hype, partly due to being marketed as the game that would be to the N64 what Donkey Kong Country was to the SNES in terms of an advancement in graphics. I never was able to beat it and I never played Banjo Tooie. It was fun though. The problem was I would get scared by some of the enemies. Same thing happened with Pilot Wings and Super Mario 64. Some bady guys just scare me or creep me out.

Some interesting information you might want to look into Joeiss:

An unusual feature of Banjo-Kazooie was that the game contained several items (specifically, a key made of ice and several different-colored eggs with question marks on them) that could not be accessed in a normal manner, or even seen, with the Ice Key being the exception (it can be seen behind a translucent wall in a walrus's cave). However, players may notice some suspicious, unaccessible areas (like a rock jutting out of the ground called "Sharkfood Island," a stone door that never opens, and a locked barrel with an X on it), but some of the eggs appear in places that are commonly accessible; the eggs don't appear until they are unlocked. A completion of the game with 100 jiggies would tease the player with some glimpses of a player entering the (now unlocked) area and standing in front of the item. Rare announced that these areas were only to be reached by completing certain tasks in the sequel, Banjo-Tooie, and linking that game up with the original in some unspecified way to unlock them (this was later to be dubbed "Stop n' Swop" by the screen which lets a player see the items). While the code for this presumably exists in the Banjo-Kazooie cartridge and has been sought after, the rest of it was apparently never implemented in Banjo-Tooie although smaller versions of the Ice Key and the purple and blue eggs could be found in Banjo-Tooie; no way to link the games has ever been found and Rare has said nothing more on the topic except to comment on the Banjo-Kazooie fanbase's fascination with it and to include reference to it in future games. Ways to reach the secret areas in Banjo-Kazooie have been found by entering certain GameShark codes, and in-game 'cheat codes' in the sandcastle at Treasure Trove Cove have been discovered to unlock access to the secret items. However, once a player has an item, he can never be rid of it: The items taken are taken in each of the three files of the game and do not disappear even when data is erased.

Banjo-Kazooie has more unusual features than just the aforementioned items, however. One of the most prominent is the existence of two doors with knockers shaped like a goblin's head. When they were opened with a GameShark, they led out a few steps and then collapsed into a bottomless pit.

A popular explanation for this fiasco is that the linkage was originally intended to be accomplished by use of the Expansion Pak to the Nintendo 64 system, which would allow data to be stored in the pack while cartridges were "hot-swapped." Originally, it was planned that the Expansion Pak would be packaged with Banjo-Tooie, however, Rareware decided instead to include it with Donkey Kong 64. It would be unreasonable to expect players to buy the expansion pack solely for Stop 'n' Swop, so Rare decided to use a rather complicated three-way swapping system between Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, and Donkey Kong 64; this is evidenced by various references to Banjo-Kazooie in beta versions of Donkey Kong 64 such as a shower in Donkey Kong's treehouse with Banjo and Kazooie on it. Unfortunately, this was too complicated, and the whole Stop 'n' Swop venture was scrapped. This storyline has not been officially confirmed by Rare, but hackers have found lines of code in all three games that seem to support this line of reasoning.