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 fine game….a bear stole me treasure! Looked a lot like you, he did!” I wouldn’t know what that meant for years.
While prototypes for games from other companies have shown up in the wild, not a single Rare title from the Nintendo years has done so. The closest anybody has come is uncovering 30-minute gameplay videos of Twelve Tales: Conker 64 and Dinosaur Planet, wherever they came from. So it was a surprise today when Tim Stamper, former head of Rare, gave a wink and a hint on his Twitter account that the original SNES version of Project Dream may still exist in prototype form.
Rare Gamer @Rare_Gamer May 28
@InTimsWorld Legend has it that you have a cartridge for Dream, if we could ever see some captures from it our minds would explode!
Tim Stamper
@InTimsWorld
.@Rare_Gamer Legend has it there were not one but two!… One great “Dream” cartridge for the SNES and one great…
He purposely trailed off there, hinting that he has not only a SNES Dream proto, but an N64 Dream proto as well. Since then his feed has been bombarded with pleas to show even the tiniest bit of them, just one JPEG. Others are outright demanding a full ROM dump.
Will Mr. Stamper share Project Dream with the world, for the first time? Stay tuned.