Former RARE dev discusses one of the most challenging portions of Banjo-Kazooie's development

In many ways, Banjo-Kazooie pushed the N64 to its limits. A game that looked and played that good took a lot of hard work, and some elements were tougher than other. In an interview with Nintendo Life, ex-Rare staffer Steve Mayles reveals thank Clanker, the giant metal shark, posed all sorts of unique challenges.

“We overcame this by manually cutting up larger textures into usable pieces. Sure, you might have got a few more seams, but the result was worth it. We’d seen earlier N64 games with blurry, muddy textures and really wanted to improve in this area. Something we did a lot of was render hi-res models with lighting then apply these textures to the in-game models. It definitely helped give the game the rich, detailed look we were after.”