More information on the legacy of Stop N Swop.
Stop N Swop was the stuff of schoolyard legend. Rare had figured out a way to transfer state between games with no memory card. The idea was, you could do something in a future game, Rare’s upon release only-planned sequel Banjo-Tooie, that could be recognized in Banjo-Kazooie. Deviously, you could see items in Banjo-Kazooie that you couldn’t collect, like an Ice Key visible behind a frozen wall of ice, that they promised you could eventually get by doing something in Banjo-Tooie that would remove the wall. They even showed video of locked-off areas in BK1 that they promised would be made accessible by doing something in BK2. Sheer madness, impossible madness!
The way it was supposed to work, the N64’s RAM kept state for a short time after the system was turned off. If you were fast enough, you could turn off the system, remove one game, put in another, and memory could persist into the latter game. That was the promise. Rare even came up with a fun trademarkable name for their clever little hack: Stop N Swop.
Stop N Swop never came to pass. In a post on MTV.com in 2008 (really, they used to have a gaming section), it was revealed that the N64 hardware was revised in such a way that reduced the time that RAM would stay active after powerdown from 10 seconds to 1 second, and they made the decision not to implement a feature that wouldn’t work on some players’ consoles.
Stop N Swop has been the center of rumors for almost 30 years now, and bits of information have leaked about it in the time since. raregamer.co.uk has a sizable recounting of the misfired feature’s whole legacy. Recently, after being laid off from Rare by Microsoft in their recent downsizing, Gregg Mayles uploaded the original design document for Stop N Swop. He did so on Twitter, a.k.a. “X,” which Set Side B does not link to on moral principle, but the images are inlined below. By the by, check out that use of Comic Sans in an important design document.
The design document also mentions Donkey Kong 64, which would have activated further features from the other games, and a projected fourth game that was never decided on. The Cutting Room Floor’s page on DK64 explains how it would have worked, and that the feature was cut in the last week before the game went to manufacturing.
Hellshade on Youtube posted a few days ago work on a series of fan recreation romhacks implementing the cut content (5 minutes). It’s n0t complete yet, and chooses N64 Ocarina of Time as the other game to complete the design. I cannot say if these hacks, which are highly unofficial content anyway, will be accurate, or will even be finished, but speculation is fun, provided one doesn’t take it seriously.
