In 1998, Nintendo would publish a game that would forever change the industry: Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie. While Banjo-Kazooie's is dearly remembered for having perfected the collect-a-thon, a genre that was all the buzz in the late 1990s, the game also birthed one of the biggest gaming conspiracies in a time when home internet access was still somewhat unusual. That’s due to the "Stop ‘n’ Swop" technology that was teased by Rare as a new revolutionary way to connect Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel, Banjo-Tooie.
But while Rare did leave breadcrumbs in Banjo-Kazooie for fans to follow into the sequel, the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology never saw the light of day. And without an official announcement by Rare, players were left in the dark for years before the truth would be revealed. But what was the Stop ‘n’ Swop transfer technology? And how could it link two different games in a time when consoles were not connected to the Internet? We’ll get there, but first, we have to explain just how exciting the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology promised to be, and how disappointed fans were once it turned to nothing.
The Stop ‘n’ Swop Hype (and Disappointment)
Imagine that the year is 1998 and you just got Banjo-Kazooie, a brand-new game for the Nintendo 64. The game is utterly amazing -- challenging but fair -- and offers a beautiful world to explore. Once you finally reach the end of the game, one of the main supporting characters tells you he has found some secret pictures. The catch is that he won’t show them to you until you’ve beaten the game 100 percent. Unfortunately, you don’t have an Internet connection in your house, and YouTube wouldn't launch until 2005. So, the only way to see the secret pictures is to toughen up, go back to the previous levels, and find every secret they hide.
Once you collect every jigsaw piece, you beat the final boss again and finally see the pictures. And they are not at all photos! They actually show small videos of Banjo and Kazooie exploring corners of the levels that were inaccessible when you went there. For example, there’s an ice key guarded by a thick wall of ice. There’s also a colored egg hidden behind a locked door in the desert. Finally, another colored egg is inside an island currently sunk under the sea. So, how can you raise the island? Open the door? Break the wall? Banjo-Kazooie’s true ending tells the players directly that those secrets would be revealed in the sequel, Banjo-Tooie, and that you would need to use both games to unlock everything.
Cut to two years later and Banjo-Tooie is released in November 2000. By now, you can imagine the excitement fans felt when plugging in Banjo-Tooie’s cartridge and rushing to completed 100 percent of the game, just to figure out how to access the secrets still hidden in the first game. Players were able to find an ice key and three mystery eggs while exploring Banjo-Tooie, but they were relatively straight-forward and didn't appear to have any connection to the original game. Of course, since we still didn’t have much going on the Internet by the year 2000, players collectively decided that there must be something else hidden and that someone just needed to find it. After all, the Rumor Mill in one of Rare’s official websites told players that:
“All the secret stuff can only be reached when playing Banjo-Tooie, the planned (and naturally better) sequel to Banjo-Kazooie. Whilst playing ‘Tooie, you’ll be able to come back to ‘Kazooie and grab the hidden goodies, before spiriting them away into the sequel where they will be put to good use. To avoid accusations that we are nasty money-grabbing types who are forcing players to fork out for both games, these secrets won’t be essential to completing Banjo-Tooie, but they will be rather spiffingly desirable, even if we say so ourselves.”
People everywhere, desperate to figure out the missing link between both games, spent years playing, re-playing, and discussing Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie, in hopes of spotting a secret no one else had. Finally, some of the mystery was revealed in the early-2000s when Rare fans and hacking enthusiasts Alan Pierce and Mitchell Kleiman cracked Banjo-Kazooie’s code and discovered a series of cheat codes that could change the game. There was one cheat code for raising the island, another one for opening the desert door, and a third one to shatter the ice wall. There were also four other secret codes, giving the player access to six mystery eggs and one ice key.
Thanks to Pierce and Kleiman, fans were able to use codes to access the secret areas of Banjo-Kazooie. However, Rare had promised a direct connection between the game and its sequel, and the codes were obviously not the intended way to reach the secrets. So what was precisely the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology? And why did it never come to fruition? Part of the answer was revealed in 2004, while the final piece of the puzzle only fell into place in 2021, when Rare’s lead engineer Paul Machacek confirmed why the project was shut down.
From Bug to Feature
To understand the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology, we need to learn how computer hardware works. (I promise, I’ll try to make this as painless as possible). The first thing we need to remember is that everything that happens in a game is just a bunch of zeros and constantly changed by calculations; every image, every sound, every player input is nothing more than numbers. Inside every computer and every game console, there’s a processor, a piece of hardware that takes care of changing all the numbers that allows for your character to move on the screen. However, another essential part of the computer or console called RAM stores all the temporary data.
Since it would be too much for any console to handle calculations for every enemy and item simultaneously, the RAM stores the temporary information that’s relevant for that moment in the game. So, while you are in a level, the RAM stores only the numbers that are important to that level. When you change levels, the RAM erases every information that’s not important and loads the new information the processor needs to keep the game running. That’s where loading screens come from, and the longer the loading screen, the more information is being changed in the RAM.
In the 1990s, Rare engineers found an interesting bug on the Nintendo 64. The console’s RAM needed a moment to erase all the information of a game when its cartridge was pulled out from the console. So, that meant that, even after turning off your Nintendo 64, some information from the last game you played was still present in the console’s RAM. What does that have to do with the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology? Well, in 2004, a Rare patent from the 1990s emerged, revealing a data-exchange technology that would use the delay of the RAM erasing data to trade information between games.
As the patent explains, the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology would have players quickly changing cartridges, so that one game could access information that was actually originated in another game. So, while playing Banjo-Tooie, players would unlock a particular item or fulfill a certain task. The data about this fulfilled task would be temporarily stored in the Nintendo 64’s RAM. Then, by trading cartridges before the RAM erased the temporary data, players would be able to access it in Banjo-Kazooie, activating the first game's secrets. In the opposite direction, once the player collected mystery eggs in Banjo-Kazooie, the quick swapping of cartridges would also allow Banjo-Tooie to read some data Banjo-Kazooie left in the RAM, importing the secret items into the sequel.
In a time before the Internet became a popular tool and consoles didn’t store saved data, being able to trade cartridges and pass information between games would have felt like magic! Children worldwide would gasp in awe when learning they could transfer items between games. So, why did Rare scrap the idea and just include the secret items directly in Banjo-Tooie? According to an official letter from 1999 brought to light by Machacek, Nintendo asked Rare to shut down the project.
In this letter, Nintendo clarified its concerns that players would damage cartridges and the Nintendo 64 while trying to swap games quickly. That could lead to criticism towards the company since Nintendo was the publisher of both Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie. Additionally, in 1999, Nintendo started to sell an upgraded version of the Nintendo 64 with improved hardware. This new version of the console had a better RAM, capable of trading data faster. That meant that there was no way to assure the information needed for the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology would remain in the RAM while players traded cartridges. Finally, early testing indicated that swapping cartridges while the console was still on (to preserve the RAM for longer) could cause overheating in the system.
Ultimately, the Nintendo 64 hardware evolved faster than Rare could release multiple games, and the Stop ‘n’ Swop technology had to be swiped under the rug. However, if the technology was still available, Banjo-Tooie could have been a whole different game, with side missions and items locked behind the cartridge-trading system. Other games could have benefited as well, as Rare intended to use the feature in Donkey Kong 64 and other titles. Fate decided this tech would be too powerful, and we’ll never know how well the feature would have really worked. But at least the full story of Banjo-Kazooie's hidden secrets has finally been revealed.
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