This game was officially going to be a Donkey Kong game, Diddy Kong Pilot, which was cancelled when to Rare moving to Microsoft, but it was reworked into Banjo-Pilot, due to Rare no longer having the rights to use Donkey Kong characters and they were forced to change it into characters from the Banjo-Kazooie series.
Banjo-Pilot was never released in Japan. It is the second Banjo-Kazooie game to have never been released in that region, the first being Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge.