Conker's Bad Fur Day - What Happened?

[Music] let's see [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to another swear Laden alcohol raging and squirrel butt shaking episode of what happened the show that reaches into the mountains of muck to pull out the wildest stories from deep within the gaming industry this is gonna be interesting you probably already noticed from the title and or thumbnail but this week's episode is all about a game from the legendary Studio known as rare again despite having a legion of old school fans and an incredible back catalog rare are no stranger to our stage and I wouldn't have it any other way the rare of old exemplify one of the best types of studio in my book one that took creative risks left and right and just made what they wanted to make and there's no better evidence of that than a game about a hungover foul-mouthed British Woodland creature who stumbles into becoming a god Emperor whilst lampooning The Matrix Clockwork Orange and saving Private Ryan you've been crazy the game is a veritable drunken dream somehow simultaneously managing all of its quirks while being both a technical showpiece and a downright fun time to boot however the road to conquer finally conquering development hell wasn't an easy one it took almost five years a near cancellation and a full reboot to get there so it all very much begs the question what happened to Conker's Bad Fur Day it's gonna be one of those days it was 1996 and the Nintendo Ultra 64 had just made a pretty respectable Splash at retail primarily driven by the Breakthrough that was Super Mario 64. you uh might have heard of it rare had been working with Nintendo at that time pumping out various titles like blast core GoldenEye and Killer Instinct gold but once Mario butt slammed his way into the marketplace it sent ripples throughout the gaming industry at large providing a handy guide on how to nail Platformers in full 3d the team that had just finished Ki gold took notice of the Plumber's Blockbuster success and started working on their own 3D platformer this is funny because despite rare eventually shipping tons of said 3D Platformers Conker's Quest was actually their first go at it and ironically their last on the Nintendo 64. as stated in my Donkey Kong video rare's fourth DK game actually started Life as a 2.5 D platformer while their other big project was still stuck in its awkward teenage RPG phase where it was known as project Dream headlined by this sudeki looking dorkus right here during the beginning of production where co-founder Tim I refuse to lead ki2's SNES build Stamper that apparently suggested to the Ki team that their 3D platformer should start a cutesy main character in order to help the game cast a wider net and also presumably so rare could have a new mascot to call their own with that in mind the team set about constructing colorful environments and getting a squirrel then named Conker running around in them fairly quickly according to an article in unseen 64 the Studio's teams were at that time kept pretty separate from one another which in part instilled a certain quote healthy rivalry between each team according to x-ray staffer Steve males they tended to not be fully aware of each other's projects and according to a Conker's BFD let's play hosted by Chris sivor once the project dream staffs on early version of conquer they decided to scrap everything they were doing and to start their own 3D platformer with a bear and bird in the title role this will be very important later at E3 1997 Nintendo publicly unveiled both games as conquer Quest and Banjo-Kazooie with the Press noting some other big similarities between the two Chris sivor who started as an artist on conquer echoed those statements in issue 174 of retro Gamer magazine the Donkey Kong lot were the golden boys and I don't think much was expected of the outcasts in the other Barn I'm being facetious of course but it serves to illustrate the state of play at that moment conquer even though it was more similar to Mario 64 in terms of tone than canceled rare RPG project dream initially was the one that had to change after Banjo-Kazooie became a thing having two cutesy first party 3D Platformers coming out at the same time on the same console was questionable but from the same Studio wasn't an option banjo was Tim stamper's baby anyway Conker's gameplay continued to take shape with the team giving him a girlfriend character by the name of Barry who could help Traverse the game's levels collect nuts and a bunch of other bog standard platformer activities despite these additions every time it was shown to the press the general consensus continued to be that banjo was the heavy favorite Outlets like n64.com felt that banjo's camera control was more fluid with ultra game players saying that Conker's overly cutesy aesthetic was a borderline disturbing the friendly competition between the two would continue later that same year when both mascots popped up in Diddy Kong Racing towards the end of 1997 only to be destroyed by The all-encompassing Savage guard Beast energy that is Timber actually going back to DKR today though might be kind of weird for some people well banjo is the same lovable self I'm banjo conquer is a gormless Smiley thumbs upper something that absolutely needed to change if he was going to continue to exist yeah in 1998 rare decided that among other things a name change was in order for the project Conker's Quest wasn't exactly the most glitzy moniker so was renamed to 12 Tales conquer 64. the team also felt that adding a multiplayer Suite with both competitive and Cooperative modes would help differentiate it from banjo which only offered a single player experience speaking of single player more elements were being added to conquer including Barry being able to hop on a dinosaur buddy to take out enemies all these changes and additions also resulted in delays so while the banjo team started to approach the Finish Line the conquered team conversely started losing confidence in their game and its continued identity crisis meanwhile a deluge of colorful mascot Platformers began jumping and or bopping onto the N64 headlined by such luminaries as chameleon twist Glover and the other ones so by this point Conker was going to be late to the party no matter how they tackled it putting the team in quite the pickle canceling or rebooting it into another genre wasn't really an option as the Stampers had been so gung-ho about Conker's potential that they had also greenlit a GBC title conkers pocket Tales which had been going smoothly thus the team continued to plug away in somewhat of a funk not really knowing what to do next which only resulted in more delays rare artists and character designer Don Murphy went on record with Emily Rogers in 2012 same bluntly 12 Tales to put it politely was not a good game software engineer Chris Marlow also shared that sentiment during an interview in the rare replay supplemental materials with there was an awful lot of content and there were lots of fun ideas but it just really wasn't gelling as a finish game with the team flandering and Banjo-Kazooie becoming rare's big 1998 smash success the threat of cancellation was starting to look like a very real possibility they either needed to come up with a solution or throw everything in the bin and move on to something else so in early 1999 Chris Seaboard took the initiative and brought an idea to the Stampers in a bid to save Conker's life which was instead of having him collecting nuts wearing hats and smiling he would swear drink and unbeknownst to them at the time fight literal piles of [ __ ] in his own words the initial idea was a simple one conquer is an innocent who wanders into difficult situations and inadvertently causes even more Mayhem before wandering off Not Looking Back conquer genuinely wants to help people but doesn't quite manage it I thought that would be funny it sort of evolved from there really as Tolkien once said the tale grew in the Italian ore in other words I made the [ __ ] up as I went along you tried doing that now in the industry pugger me the planners would have an epileptic aneurysm the response from the Stampers to all of this was along the lines of I love it the New Direction was genuinely bold and fresh emphasizing narrative and humor over collecting scores of bubbly wobblies or whether ever it is that the British love to collect with the stamper's green light and a promotion for Chris to project leader development on conquer was restarted although obviously they had a decent amount of existing assets and Technology at their disposal many new characters were created during this process While others got some pretty drastic makeovers cut to comparison pick of Barry right now conquer in a rather odd but brilliant move not only stayed the same but got even cuter in that same issue of retro gamer I mentioned earlier Chris explained this decision that was one of the few things that carried over from 12 Tales where the squirreliness of conquer had more relevance indeed his initial movement style was on four legs jumping from point to point very much like his real world counterpart generally though it's as good a cutesy character as any in fact if you looked at the character design from 12 Tales it became a lot more cutesy in Bad Fur Day which juxtapose nicely with the actual tone of the game this restarting of development was obviously unknown to the general public but by late 1999 questions from both the media and fans are becoming more and more insistent asking hey whatever happened to Conker 64 is he canceled well well not not the character himself well nowadays conquer would be but but was this video game canceled it got to the point where rare had to say something and in this case it was on their official FAQ page no it hasn't it's still being worked on by a full team and with the same level of dedication as when it was first announced and that wasn't a lie the change in Direction completely reinvigorated the team with everyone wanting to get in on the joke as it were contributing more gags characters and punch lines to the insane World Chris had created so all things creatively was starting to fire on all cylinders it was just one tiny thing left to take care of which was telling Nintendo that the they were now publishing a game that had sunflowers with massive yabbos despite my earlier foreshadowing guess what Nintendo were actually all like um okay if you're sure when informed that conquer would now be targeting a mature rating complete with blood alcohol and tons of swearing Again rare's Games along with Nintendo's own were the Platinum sellers on the N64 so there was very little pushback from Nintendo except for two specific references that they asked to be removed for those of you that are morbidly curious the offending jokes were a reference to Pokemon and on the polar opposite end of the spectrum the uh well Ku Klux Klan aside from that Chris said that 99.9 of all the edgy material they had wanted to include made it into the final game with the creative juices cooking development finally started to go smoothly pop culture references or sprinkled liberally throughout the game forming the backbone of many of Conker's most iconic sequences is with the Saving Private Ryan one being a standout in retro gamer Chris admitted that the amount of work that went into that whole set piece was a game's worth in itself it was decided that the camera system should also be more cinematic since the gameplay was starting to revolve more on contextual interactions rather than platforming so the team took inspiration from an unlikely source Prince of Persia 3D was cited as an example of the type of camera angles that the conquer team wanted to implement but thankfully they did so to a much more successful degree in terms of Graphics rare Engineers supposedly spent at least six weeks rewriting and optimizing Nintendo's provided micro code which only featured comments in Japanese in order to support more advanced lighting and audio capabilities all character interactions in conquer were also fully voiced so became one of the very few N64 games to ship on a 64 megabyte cart alongside other monster Whoppers like Resident Evil 2. even with that the team ultimately couldn't cram absolutely everything in as there were still around 20 percent more content that they had planned but weren't able to finish including lengthier sections involving hell and Greg the boss fight with the bull being even more extensive I can't imagine that and the windmill containing several additional characters and storyline sequences in Chris's own words that he shared with retro gamer time was and is always the great enemy would you get that from a fortune cookie then after a tremendously long-winded development Conkers Bad Fur Day was set to be Unleashed on the gaming World in March 2001 just months away from the gamecube's debut later that year the launch of their new console was obviously where most of Nintendo's attention was so when they decided to publish conquer with wait no they they didn't publish conquer why wait is this a Mandela effect thing I'm aware that the European publishing rights were snapped up by THQ but the North American version was self-published by Rare bizarre I guess Nintendo didn't want any of that smoke which might explain why they decided against using any of their regular marketing Avenues chiefly Nintendo Power which just stopped mentioning conquered the second the potty humor started to Bubble Up from the toilet they just straight up ghosted it this meant that Gamers who used NP as their main source of information for upcoming releases might not even know conquer had come out subscriber counts for NP aren't widely available but based on the little data that's out there they likely had a readership in the hundreds of thousands around that time frame it was an important arm of Nintendo's marketing strategy so a major game getting skipped entirely wasn't really going to help matters while Nintendo had their name taken off the Box marking was still handled and funded by them accompanied by the name of a starcom did the actual Dirty Work they held promotions and events in college campuses bars as well as late night TV and even adult magazines but nowhere else not on websites Saturday morning cartoon blocks or even in comic books this was obviously because Nintendo wasn't comfortable with promoting such quote-unquote mature content and unfortunately their worries weren't entirely unfounded KB Toys refused to stalk it newspapers like the Los Angeles Times wrote up stories about how the once pure Chase Nintendo had suddenly decided to Pedal smut to miners they even got quotes from a mom in Indiana who said after buying the m-rated game aim for her 15 year old this is disgusting sophomoric humor and I'm disappointed in Nintendo it's like Disney releasing pornography the obvious problem with this marketing approach For an upcoming Nintendo game was that it was aimed at a very specific demographic that probably wasn't interested in Nintendo games given the meteoric rise of the PlayStation brand why buy the erotic squirrel poo game when Red Faction 2 Twisted Metal black and Final Fantasy 10 were on the horizon unfortunately in this shouldn't surprise anyone Conkers Bad Fur Day Jaeger bombed at retail information leaked to IGN back in the day points at the game moving less than 55 000 copies in North America during its first month with the leaked figures specifying that the game was doing worse and worse as time went on this is the old proverbial shame as the gaming media keep tons of Praise on rare's wild and weird gamble it landed incredibly High High review scores across the board and without a doubt lived up to rare's already very lofty standards this was the freshest most unique thing they'd released in years breaking away from the collect-a-thon conveyor belt the studio had gradually become and delivering a truly Creative Vision despite the disastrous sales the conquer team briefly worked on a sequel conkers other bad day which would have directly followed up from The Originals ending this was unfortunately happening right in the middle of rare's ownership switching hands with Microsoft rejecting the continued development of other bad day once the conquered ball had bounced into their Court eventually a remake was expanded online multiplayer was released right at the tail end of the Xbox's life so conquer live and reloaded achieved better but still barely flaccid sales according to NPD group it sold around 150 000 units in its launch month which while not Dreadful was still not the type of sales that you'd hoped for from a big exclusive Chris then pitched another sequel this time trying to appeal to Microsoft's pension for pushing games with Xbox Live functionality with conquer getting medieval which was set to dispense with the single player story altogether and go all in on the well-received multiplayer aspects seen in live and reloaded if I'm sounding like a broken record here I apologize but Microsoft also rejected this pitch then after completing work on 2010's connect sports Chris sivor decided to move on quitting rare after over 15 years at the studio conquer wasn't so lucky remaining locked within the Microsoft vaults with no chance of Escape kinda in 2014 fans around the world rejoiced to see the jumped up little bugger return and Project Spark I wasn't even aware of this but apparently the first content pack that featured a new story which was a Canon follow-up to Bad Fur Day dubbed Conker's big reunion actually came out well part of it it was meant to follow an episodic model and although the first one did make it out the following episodes weren't so lucky which was just oh so 2015 era Microsoft Chris evor even came back to voice little guy before it all went ass up so it was a shame it ended so abruptly and the less said about Conker's weird hololens appearance the better except that you can actually still play it yeah but that might be something for Uncle Derek to fart around with if he can afford it eventually a bone was thrown to conquer fans in the form of rare replay one of the best collection ever released as it contains the original N64 version of Bad Fur Day fully playable and shinier than ever on Modern Xboxes Chris would go on to an independent career with his own startup gory detail with his last project being the odd but Charming the unlikely Legend of Rusty pup as is tradition all summarize this episode in the same way I end a lot of rare Focus videos they made a super cool thing once some wacky stuff happened Microsoft proceeded to do the bare minimum with said cool thing which has now resulted in long periods have absolutely nothing in 2023 this is now a very sobering reminder that Conker's Bad Fur Day has been stretched into some Bad Fur years well so ends another incident in my day thanks goes out to daily Kong for her help with this video if you know of any other squirrely developments in the video game or movie Industries let me know in the comments below or over on my Twitter see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] ha ha

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 479,673

Keywords: matt mcmuscles, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Rareware, What Happend?, wha happun?, video game documentaries, Conker, Conker Live and Reloaded

Id: mVGx7zLymUk

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023