Ex-Rare Staff Talk Killer Instinct

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Chris Tilston and Phil Dunne, once a part of the team at Rare that worked on such huge hits as Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie and Golden Eye, and now working for the four-man indie team Starfire Studios, revealed some interesting facts about the SNES fighting game Killer Instinct.

Killer Instinct was designed to be "loud, brash and in your face" for the arcade market, and Tilston admits the fighter was never intended for home consoles. Despite others at Rare saying they would never be able to trim down the detail to get it running on SNES hardware, Chris managed to get rid of 80 per cent of the animation, calling it "a bastardisation" of the arcade version.

However, he revealed that the game did very well, selling 3.2 million copies.

A sequel, Killer Instinct 2, was even quite far along into development for the same console, with more frames and high quality graphics. But when the Nintendo 64 came around, the team made Killer Instinct Gold for the new system.

Asked if they would like to do a new Killer Instinct game if Microsoft approached them, Tilston replied:

Yeah. We'd consider it, yeah definitely. But they've got a team of guys at Rare. There's nobody from the original team left."

Dunne also revealed the game eventually released as Banjo Pilot on Game Boy Advance was originally going to be Donkey Kong Pilot and was actually completed. But once Rare was sold to Microsoft, they couldn't use the Donkey Kong license and that become Banjo.

We do know that Banjo Pilot was previously going to be Diddy Kong Pilot, so it could be a mistake on Dunne's part referring to the game as Donkey Kong Pilot.