During Rare's Nintendo days, the studio made a habit of producing cutting-edge games on aging hardware. In late-1994, its pre-rendered platformer Donkey Kong Country allowed the sprite-focused SNES to compete with the polygon-powered PlayStation. However, a contemporary project codenamed Project Dream was struggling to find form.
It too employed pre-rendered visuals, but was isometric rather than side-on. Dream was an action adventure featuring pirates that was intended to be vast in scale, and it was pushing the SNES even further than Donkey Kong Country. Character designer Ed Bryan joined the Dream team after cutting his teeth at Rare on a coin-op brawler. "I was in the Killer Instinct stable for a little while, after that I moved to a project in the Donkey Kong barn that was called Dream," Bryan recalls.
