How Stop N Swop Was Meant To Work

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…

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