Project Dream: Land of Giants, the story of how a boy and his dog became a bear and breegull. Rare, the company behind the abandoned SNES game “Project Dream: Land of Giants”, on the 22nd, December, 2015, uploaded to youtube, a 10 minute behind the scenes look story of what really happened to the never to be released SNES game. In the space of a few weeks the video has over 217,000 hits to date, such is the interest in a game that never was.

Gregg Mayles, a game designer on Project Dream stated “they wanted to make a fairytale, magical RPG game.  They thought they could take the graphic technology from Donkey Kong Country, take it a step further and apply it to a different type of game”.

The video illustrates Project Dream’s stunning, long lost graphics and gameplay, of the wooden sword wielding hero main character, Edison, his special dog, Dinger, the ginormous stomping dinosaur and its “floating” environment which had already been developed but never taken further.

However, game engineer, Paul Machacek said “a decision was made to move across to the N64, which had just been released at the time.  They spent a further 16 months working on the game editing it but they just couldn’t get a hook of the game”.

Greg Mayles added, “over a period of time, the fairytale-esk element and land of giants kind of went away and got replaced with a piratey theme”.

As the pirate theme took over the game, Mayles said that the main character and hero, “Edison, started to lose his relevance as the world was changing around him”.  At this time Mayles said “they started hitting upon a bear giving it humanoid qualities” as the main character.

Artist, Ed Bryan, commented “over the coming weeks and months the game became too big a thing to do and it all started to change quite dramatically.  It kind of changed into something we were more familiar with which was turning more into a kind of Donkey Kong Country, side on style game that they felt more suited to do”.

Mayles said “they really liked the bear so they thought, can we come up with another game that we feel more confident we could build in a reasonable time frame, then we kind of took Banjo the bear out of the Project Dream game and eventually it became the game known as Banjo Kazooie”.

Foe more on the story and the in depth behind the scenes look of how one game – Project Dream: Land of Giants, ended up being turned into another game – Banjo Kazooie, you can watch the whole video, found here .

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