Several Nintendo 64 games are undergoing decompilation. One of them is Rare’s game.

Banjo-Kazooie is officially available on PC via Xbox Cloud Gaming (which requires an [Xbox] Game Pass Ultimate subscription and being in a country where you can play from the cloud), but there’s no word on a native PC port, which is no surprise: Nintendo very rarely brings its platform-exclusive games to Steam (Sonic Lost World and the first part of Bayonetta are exceptions for different reasons; don’t even dream of a big N’s IP moving to PC).

The native PC port has several advantages beyond its ability to run locally for more stable performance: we can use higher resolutions, but modern effects are not left out, as we have already seen a working example of ray tracing in the PC port of Mario 64. You can see the Banjo-Kazooie project on GitHub, but the team has no official name. We know the members’ nicknames (MittenzHugg, Mr-Wiseguy, Ryan-Myers, ThatCowGuy, Kaimeister, RageCage64, Wedarobi, eEarthcrafterman, Isotarge, Mkst), the project is currently 80% complete.

Nintendo cannot be involved in it as it is not legally allowed to do so. The team will not use the leaked source code but will recreate the game from scratch using modern programming languages. There are more than 20 such projects in the pipeline, including Perfect Dark, Mario Kart 64, Paper Mario, Blast Corps, Body Harvest, Bomberman 64, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Dinosaur Planet, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, Mario Party 3, Mischief Makers, Mystical Ninja, Pokémon Snap, Pokémon Stadium, Snowboard Kids, Turok 3 and Yoshi’s Story.

So reverse engineering is a big thing these days, and it’s not just happening around Nintendo. We previously reported that Naughty Dog’s Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy for PlayStation 2 was being remade for PC, although it had one significant shortcoming (no sound).

Source: VGC