The concept of vehicle building was the fourth idea chosen from others that included a remake of the original game, a direct sequel to Banjo-Tooie, and a traditional platforming game, but with Gruntilda trying to follow Banjo and Kazooie around every world and replicating their moves in an effort to better them.
This game was going to be a remake of the original, but eventually, the project evolved into a construction-oriented game which was inspired by connecting Lego blocks.
Shortly after release it was discovered that the text in the game was too small to be read by players with non-HD TVs. Because HDTV adoption was still in it's infancy this caused a significant portion of players to be unable to properly experience the game. Rare quickly worked on a patch to fix this which was released shortly before Christmas of that year.