Trivia / Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

• Creator Backlash: While series co-director Gregg Mayles doesn't hate the game, he has admitted in a 2020 retrospective with Xbox: The Official Magazine that it was too much of a radical shift from the Banjo-Kazooie series and that it should have been its own thing instead of being an entry in the franchise. Series composer Grant Kirkhope has expressed similar sentiments on his Twitter account and Game Grumps.
• Franchise Killer: For Banjo-Kazooie, naturally. While the bear and bird would continue to cameo and make appearances in other games, such as Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing^note Only in the Xbox 360 version. and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, the series hasn't seen a new entry ever since.
• The Other Darrin: At the start of the game, Fat Banjo is voiced by Steve Burke. When Banjo is turned back to his normal self, Chris Sutherland resumes the role.
• What Could Have Been:
  • At one point in development, the game was planned to be a meta-remake of the first Banjo-Kazooie that would more or less follow the plot of the original to the letter, but would later diverge in wild and unexpected ways, and would culminate in the characters realizing that they're in a remake.
  • The game was at one point intended to have a Wild West-themed world called Weird West, but it was cut due to time constraints. Random dialogue from the villagers and L.O.G. mentions that it would have been accessible from the area with the boarded-up houses where Klungo's arcade resides, and one of the Grunty challenges in the Jiggosseum was most likely intended for the cut world due to it being the only world with two challenges.
  • There were plans for an animated TV series that would air around 2008 to coincide with the release of Nuts & Bolts It would also air alongside the Viva Piñata animated series on the 4Kids TV Saturday morning block. This idea was scrapped for unknown reasons, possibly either due to 4Kids going bankrupt around that time or possibly due to the poor sales of the game itself.
  • The developers planned to promote Nuts & Bolts by entering the Red Bull Flugtag, They even had an application pitched to the event but the idea was rejected.
  • Concept art for the game shows an early version of L.O.G. known as the "Evil Toymaker". From the art, it can be implied that this character would have been a Greater-Scope Villain working behind the scenes. In a series first, this would have marked the first time a character other than Gruntilda was the main villain before the idea was eventually scrapped.

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