Banjo and Kazooie star in arm-waving SXSW crowd game

Banjo and Kazooie appeared in a brand new motion controlled game on Saturday, but don't expect it to hit your Xbox One any time soon. The bear-and-bird duo had a surprise role at the beginning of the SXSW Gaming Awards, in which the entire audience was invited to help guide them in pursuit of notes and jiggies.

The game borrowed the angular, cartoony style of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and asked its players to control Kazooie's flight by waving their arms from one side to the other. The audience tried to pick up notes, jiggies, and pieces of the SXSW logo while avoiding dynamite and choosing from a few branching paths.

You can watch it yourself on Twitch, though the audio's been muted for copyright reasons. Rare noted on its Twitter account that Audience Entertainment created the experience with its blessing, and that it was made "exclusively for the crowd" at the award show - so don't expect it to show up anywhere else.

Even if that is a bit discouraging for longtime Banjo Kazooie fans who didn't happen to be in the audience to play, it is the latest demonstration that Rare is still making use of its vaunted stable.

It may be courting heartbreak to look for some sign of a pending Banjo Kazooie revival in this little award show appetizer. But with this and the Battletoads showing up in Shovel Knight on Xbox One, at least you know the old Rare guard hasn't been forgotten.

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar.