Way back when Rare was at its arguable peak and bringing both Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel, Banjo-Tooie, to the world, it had one very special feature planned for both games that would ultimately be left on the cutting room floor but would live on in infamy since.
Dubbed Stop N Swop, it was a feature that would make clever use of the Nintendo 64’s memory quirks to allow players to unlock extra content between the two Banjo games by quickly swapping out the cartridge that was inserted. The idea was scrapped with Nintendo allegedly concerned about players damaging their cartridges by attempting to rapidly change them out, and it seemingly knew it would eventually release an updated spec for the N64 with a motherboard that wouldn’t hold the information in memory long enough.
Although the feature would later be retroactively implemented in the Xbox Live Arcade release of the game, where it would allow players to unlock extra content in the fairly-unsuccessful Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, seemingly nobody has been able to get it working as originally intended and on a standard, retail N64 – until now.
A YouTuber by the name of Skawo has uploaded a video showing them playing a standard copy of Banjo-Kazooie, sans any of the Stop N Swop unlocks, before booting up a flashed cartridge with a modded copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time designed to dump the necessary information to the N64 console’s memory (after an amusing exchange between Link and “Skawo,” and then very quickly swapping back to Banjo to show that they’d successfully unlocked the content.
Take a look at the process in full below:
More information on the legendary Stop N Swop feature as well as the many other secrets and mysteries of Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie can be found right here.
