Conker's Bad Fur Day

• 1. Introduction

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  Conker's Bad Fur Day, a 2001 Nintendo 64 game from the developer Rare, hinges on a villain who wants a red squirrel to serve as the missing leg of his table. The squirrel is Conker, a greedy, hard-drinking creature trying to get home to his girlfriend, Berri. He never travels in a straight line.

  This was the second game in the Conker series, after Conker's Pocket Tales in 1999. On the surface it looked like a cousin of Rare's earlier hits Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo-Tooie. Underneath, it was built for adults, with graphic violence, profanity, and a steady stream of toilet humour.

  How did a project that began as a cuddly mascot adventure turn into this? What happened when Nintendo, a company known for family games, had to put its name on something so crude? And why did a game that critics adored sell far below hopes, yet still gather a devoted following?

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• 2. Cute Beginnings

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  In June 1997, Nintendo opened its presentations at the Electronic Entertainment Expo with two Rare games. One was Banjo-Kazooie. The other was a squirrel adventure called Conker's Quest.

  The roots of that squirrel game went back to 1996. A small group at Rare, known as a barn, had started sketching a generic 3D platform adventure while Killer Instinct Gold was in production. Super Mario 64 had just proved how well the genre could sell. Tim Stamper wanted the star to be a cute squirrel mascot from the very beginning, because that promised the widest possible appeal. The team behind another project, called Dream, saw the unfinished engine and switched Dream from a role-playing game to a platformer.

  Early press was warm but uncertain. N64.com described Conker's Quest as Super Mario 64 with the feel of Disney's version of Bambi. Conker would collect nuts, battle giants, and travel with a female squirrel. The cameras were unfinished, and journalists struggled to tell it apart from Banjo-Kazooie, which they preferred by a wide margin. A writer at Ultra Game Players called the play competent and even addictive. He also warned that its "disturbing" cuteness might push away older players.

  By the 1998 Expo, the game had a new name: Twelve Tales: Conker 64, scheduled for fall 1998. The magazine 64 suspected the change was meant to avoid confusion with another Nintendo 64 title, Quest 64. The plan was ambitious. Players could choose Conker or Berri in single-player mode. Conker's stages were fast arcade platforming, while Berri's were puzzle stages in which she guided and fed a dinosaur companion that protected her. Two multiplayer modes were also promised. One was a cooperative game pairing Conker with an owl, and the other a four-player split-screen battle fought with acorns. In this version, Conker walked on four legs.

  Coverage at that Expo leaned positive. Total 64 judged the visuals better than the Zelda game Nintendo showed at the same event, and praised the four-player mode as highly imaginative. Journalist Andy McDermott liked the sheer amount of content. He did not like the writing, which he called Americanized with "colonial-style comments", or the "infuriatingly happy music". Next Generation went further and called a squirrel gathering acorns in forests it found "stunningly unimaginative" a rip-off of Mr. Nutz, a 16-bit platformer from 1993.

  The most common worry was the kid-friendly tone, especially now that Banjo-Kazooie had arrived. That concerned Rare, and it set off a complete redesign.

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• 3. The Pitch

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  Two years was the original schedule for Conker, but fights among the workers in the barn stretched it out. Artist Don Murphy thought the game was not very good. Software engineer Chris Marlow remembered "an awful lot of content and there were lots of fun ideas, but it just really wasn't gelling as a finished game".

  The market was also against it. Mario 64-style platformers were everywhere, and Rare's own Banjo-Kazooie had already shipped to critical and commercial success. The team faced a choice. Either the game changed, or it was cancelled and the staff scattered to other barns. Meanwhile, delays and silence led the press to assume Twelve Tales had quietly died.

  Then Chris Seavor, who had joined the project as an artist, went to Tim and Chris Stamper with an idea he had been carrying since the Twelve Tales days. It was a day-in-the-life game called Bad Fur Day. Conker would try to help other characters and make things worse each time. Seavor wanted a story that gave the hero a personality, and he wanted the violence to feel edgy. The Stampers loved it and promoted him to project lead.

  His first act was to rework a task called Wasps and the Queen Bee. Tim Stamper had imagined wasps stealing a beehive, but Seavor saw no reason behind it and no punchline. His fix was to give the hive guns that shoot the wasps. The founders loved that and told the team to "make more of that". The result was a formula for later missions. Each had an introduction, an interactive middle, and an "extreme punchline" cutscene as the reward.

  The developers later summed up the logic. They already had a main character, though he was eventually remodeled, and plenty of code. Changing direction made sense, and in their words "Mature humour was a key element".

  In January 2000, Rare publicly insisted the game was still in the hands of a full team working with the same dedication as at its announcement. During 2000, Twelve Tales: Conker 64 was retooled into Conker's Bad Fur Day, packed with scatological jokes. Only one piece of the old project survived into the final game, the moment where Conker urinates on his enemies.

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• 4. Cash and Consequences

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  Money is the engine of Conker's Bad Fur Day. Many levels in the overworld stay blocked until Conker has earned a certain amount of cash. Reaching the cavemen of Uga Buga costs $1,000 paid to weasel guards. Mr. Barrel demands $2,110 to launch Conker down a slope and smash the barrier into the haunted Spooky area.

  Each level is an enclosed space that the player can explore freely, and the work is mostly helping other characters. Tasks include beating bosses, solving puzzles, collecting objects, and racing rivals. Every completed task pays out cash, which opens the next area. The hub is a place called Windy, with entrances to the farm Barn Boys, the dung-filled Sloprano, Heist, Spooky, Bats Tower, and It's War.

  Conker himself is deliberately simple compared with the heroes of Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong 64. He runs, jumps, and swings a frying pan. He can swim for a short time, climb ladders and ropes, and push objects. Health comes from eating pieces of "anti-gravity" chocolate. The real variety comes from context-sensitive pads. Stepping on one and pressing the B button gives Conker a temporary ability. The first pad has him swallow Alka-Seltzer to cure his hangover. Others turn him into an anvil or hand him a shotgun, a blow torch, throwing knives, or a slingshot. The pads also tell the player what to do next. Later sections lean toward shooting.

  One mission shows the tone of the whole game. A dung beetle will give Conker the poo balls he needs if he makes the farm cows relieve themselves in the pasture. That means opening a spigot of prune juice and using a bull to open gates, and then to kill each cow once it finishes.

  The multiplayer mode supports up to four players across seven game types: Beach, Raptor, Heist, War, Tank, Race and Deathmatch. In Raptor, one team plays raptors feeding a baby dinosaur while the other plays cavemen stealing dinosaur eggs. Heist sends teams after a cash bag in a bank. War can be capture the flag or a mode where teams steal gas canisters to release a deadly chemical cloud. Players can adjust score limits, lives, and computer-controlled bots.

  The story begins with Conker waking lost and hungover the morning after a binge with friends who are about to be drafted. The ruler of this land, the Panther King, sends his minions after a red squirrel on the advice of his servant, Professor Von Kriplespac. Conker, distracted by loose cash, stumbles into increasingly absurd trouble. He recovers a beehive from giant wasps and confronts a giant opera-singing pile of dung called The Great Mighty Poo. Don Weaso, head of the Weasel Mafia, orders him to bomb a village of cavemen. His vampiric ancestor Count Batula turns him into a bat to feed on a mob of villagers. Finally, he is drafted into a war between grey squirrels and the Tediz, a Nazi-like army of teddy bears, whom he destroys.

  The tone then turns. Don Weaso enlists Conker and Berri to rob the Feral Reserve Bank, but the vault is a trap set by the Panther King. On his orders, Weaso shoots Berri, and she dies in Conker's arms. Then the Panther King clutches his chest, and a creature like the one in Alien bursts out and kills him. Von Kriplespac gleefully explains that he created the creature, named Heinrich, and that the room is a spaceship now in low orbit. He sends Heinrich after Conker as revenge for the Tediz, which were also his creations.

  Conker opens an airlock and sends the professor and both corpses into space. He then fights Heinrich in a robotic suit. Even after being thrown into space, Heinrich crawls back aboard. As Conker faces defeat, the game freezes, and he complains that Rare never tested it properly. Through a command-line interface, he strikes a deal with the programmers. He will keep the lockup secret if they help. Conker picks a katana, asks to be taken to the throne room, and decapitates Heinrich. The freed servants crown him king.

  Conker never wanted the crown. He realizes too late that he should have asked the programmers to bring Berri back, and finds they have already gone. From the throne he delivers a closing monologue on valuing what you have, saying "the grass is always greener, and you don't know what it is you have until it's gone". After the credits, he is back at the pub, now empty because his friends died in the war. A storm is starting, and he staggers out in the opposite direction from the way he came.

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• 5. Parody and Leftovers

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  The team behind Conker worked by instinct rather than by plan. Cutscene dialogue and gameplay ideas came up spontaneously among the developers, who held only a rough sense of each level's story. Of all the dialogue, only the introduction was scripted. Ideas were tracked on notepads. Shawn Pile wrote a custom language that let the team change the game's structures in seconds, where otherwise a change would have taken "two-and-a-half to three minutes".

  The beginning, middle and end of the story were written together, so events planned for late in the game shaped what appeared early. The game was split into lengthy chapters to fit three save files into just four kilobytes of SRAM. Seavor's guiding rule was that story should serve play. In his words, "Just doing a 'thing' like hitting something with a brick is far more engaging if there's a motivation behind it to disguise the binary nature of the act". A planned baseball bat became a frying pan, because a pan hitting something justified a funnier sound effect.

  At first, the developers cared more about gameplay than comedy. Over time they noticed levels came together faster when comedy led. That became obvious with film parodies, which Seavor chose to pursue after adding a Terminator reference in the barnyard scene. The parodies fed ideas for music, sound, design and play. A lobby chase spoofing The Matrix gave composer Robin Beanland the idea for interactive music, in which gunfire fades an upbeat arrangement into a calmer one.

  The list of targets is long. The game opens with a shot-by-shot recreation of the intro of A Clockwork Orange. The shark-bulldog Brute borrows from Jaws, including its music cues. Star Wars, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Apocalypse Now are all spoofed. A catfish drops a Trading Places joke, and the final boss fight echoes Aliens.

  The game also mocks its own genre. Burt, a metal box in the Barn Boys chapter, stands still only to open a gate, a jab at characters who exist just to be talked to. Floating chocolate gets an in-world explanation, since collectibles in other games float for no reason. A skeleton named Gregg greets Conker at death, an attempt to make sense of having multiple lives. Bosses take four hits instead of the usual three. Even the hero's grumbling about menial missions pokes at thin villain motives in other games.

  British comedy left its mark too. A running gag was inspired by a trivial, banal joke in the Monty Python sketch "Blancmange Playing Tennis", and a cow was modeled on a guard in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The fart-noise arrangement of one level's theme took its cue from the song "Uncle Fucka" in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Real people appear as well. The scarecrow Birdy was based on a bearded Rare developer, and Gregg was named for Gregg Mayles. The bee king came from a scruffy man Seavor met on a street in Nottingham, who shouted at him, "don't speak to me like that, in my country I am a king."

  Seavor said "pretty much 99.9%" of the writing survived. Even so, planned gameplay ran about 20% longer than what shipped, and time ran out for the rest. Nintendo cut some offensive material, including cutscenes with characters dressed as the Ku Klux Klan and a joke aimed at Pokémon. The opening shot of Conker slashing the N64 logo in half was initially disapproved too. In 2013, developers recalled that Tim Stamper may have met Nintendo to settle the dispute.

  Scrapped content included four cheese characters for the barn: Camembert, Ninja Cheese, Cheese Crate and King Dick Cheesy III. There were also six "Drugrats", among them Roach, Cornsacks and Floury. A bigger "Yeehaa!" level featuring the bull Bugger Lugs was cut down. A barred hole in the Poo Cabin hides an unreachable chocolate piece, the entrance to an unfinished area. Seavor left it there on purpose to annoy players. Closing-credit outtakes in the style of Toy Story 2 were begun but never finished. One would have shown a "Mad Pitchfork" scene in which Conker's voice turns "primadonna".

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• 6. Squeezing the Cartridge

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  Rare studied Super Mario 64 closely, especially its camera. The staff noticed that it and Prince of Persia 3D both used fixed views the player could not control. For a cinematic feel, Rare chose a fixed camera pulled far back. Lighting demanded harder work. To reach four simultaneous light sources, one programmer spent four months deciphering and rewriting the Nintendo-supplied microcode for the Reality Coprocessor, which was commented in Japanese. Another microcoded support for MP3, reverberation and Dolby Pro Logic surround sound.

  Cutscenes added up to around two hours. Marlow built a cutscene editor to combine separately made animations, audio, effects and camera setups. It had no way to preview just a section, so each change meant replaying a whole scene. Small edits, like fixing text or retiming speech bubbles to a camera cut, became tedious.

  Nintendo's Seal of Quality testing was strict. The game was tested in the United States for five days with no bugs found. Then the Japan unit, 24 hours into a three-day test, noticed a cutscene in the first level that never triggered. Gregg's introductory scene plays the first time the player dies, and the programmers had assumed no one would reach the Spooky level, where the reaper returns, without dying. A tester did. In the final game, the death scene plays as soon as Conker reaches that stage.

  Animation was done in Maya. Beanland and animator Louise Ridgeway estimated 8.7 seconds of animation per day, or two-to-three cycles. Small details came first. The Fire Imps react if a swear word is typed into the cheat code menu, and the camera shakes with a sound effect when something hits it. That approach sometimes meant tedium, like animating each brick on a bridge separately. Drunken movement needed research. For Conker's juggling, David Rose taught Ridgeway to juggle.

  Conker has 2,000 animations, 15 of them idle ones. The tail got special attention, and the team thought of it as a "bag of air". Marlow coded held objects as attached to joints other than the body part touching them. The juggling balls followed his right hip, the Game Boy hung from his foot, and the frying pan rode on his wrist.

  Two animation shortcuts were deliberate. In the peeing attack, only Conker's back was animated, because showing the front could have earned an Adults Only rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Cheek puffing during whistling was built, broke in testing, and was fixed too late to include.

  Voice acting was another way Seavor set the game apart. A few staff called it too much work. Seavor said that for Beanland it "was like laying down a challenge, one we both accepted and relished". Voices were recorded first for each mission, and one session lasted an hour. Seavor described the two of them "having some fun with stupid voices". All that speech helped push the game onto a 64 MB cartridge, one of few Nintendo 64 games that large, with roughly 40-48 MB given to audio.

  Seavor voiced all the male characters, Conker included, plus two female ones, with The Great Mighty Poo as the exception. Ridgeway voiced the other women. The Jerky Boys shaped the direction, as in the New York accent of the Nasty Wasps. Ridgeway played Berri with an American accent. In 2015 she recalled having just flown in from Dublin and "never been anywhere in my life", so she added "like" constantly. The Ugas were hardest. After failing to imitate cavemen from At the Earth's Core, the pair settled on random grunts and fast phrases.

  Music changed with location by raising and lowering the volume of MIDI channels. One MIDI file allows 16 channels, so audio software engineer Mike Currington made two files sync up to reach 32. The intro to It's War imitates the chaos of Saving Private Ryan, with bullet hits programmed as panned MIDI notes. The Great Mighty Poo was performed by Marlow, who had operatic experience. He recorded the song "Sloprano" in a single afternoon, and Seavor and Beanland wrote it to fit his talent.

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• 7. Backlash and Sales

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  A mother in Schererville, Indiana, told the Los Angeles Times she bought the game for her 15-year-old son. She called it "disgusting, sophomoric humor" and said she was "disappointed in Nintendo". Her verdict was "It's like Disney releasing pornography". The paper reported that other parents used to Nintendo were horrified too.

  The Entertainment Software Rating Board gave the game an M rating for animated violence, mature sexual themes, and strong language. It was the second Nintendo-distributed M title, after Rare's Perfect Dark in 2000. Nintendo's reasoning was demographic. Spokeswoman Perrin Kaplan said that "kids who were 6 when they played the first Mario game are now 26". Less than a year before release, players aged 18 and over made up 58% of console players, and those 35 and older 21%. Adult-oriented PlayStation franchises like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil had driven that shift. Nintendo, with around three quarters of its 2000 revenue from child-friendly games, could not fight Sony on children's properties alone.

  Still, Nintendo had reservations. Rare said the company worried that children might mistake the game for one aimed at them. Nintendo of America declined to cover it in Nintendo Power, though official magazines elsewhere did. Strategy guides were packaged in black polybags carrying warnings like the one on the box. KB Toys, which specialised in toys and games for children, refused to stock it.

  The agency Starcom aimed its campaign at college males, with ads in bars, colleges, late-night television and adult magazines. The budget was $5 million. A video ad called "Girl Talk", also titled "69 Uncensored Seconds" on the website, showed a squirrel and a half-naked woman in bed after a night of partying. Urinal mats in bathrooms in major cities carried the game's web address. Starcom's Gina Broderick explained the idea: "Being in bars is absolutely being in their element, and because urinating is part of game play, it made total sense".

  Playboy joined in. From March to the 5th of April 2001, the magazine ran its first video-game tour, with Beach-mode multiplayer parties at 20 American colleges. Miss March 2001, Miriam Gonzalez, hosted. Winners received green Nintendo 64 consoles and games, and the top scorer overall won trips to two Playmate of the Year parties at the Playboy Mansion. Spring break parties added "King of Tail" tattoo contests and giveaways including t-shirts reading "Got Tail?". Three mock colouring-book ads ran in magazines like Maxim. One told readers "Help Conker stop the bullies. Use your Yellow crayon" beside a picture of him urinating on flames. Another read "Shhh! Conker is taking a nap", with his head in a toilet. Starcom won two International Advertising Festival awards, and judges named it a top-three contender for the Grand Prix.

  The game reached North America on the 5th of March 2001. It was the best-selling mature-rated game of its first month, and its website drew 300,000 unique visitors in two weeks. But only about 55,000 copies sold in that first month. Likely causes were a high price, ads that excluded younger buyers, and release late in the console's life.

  Europe nearly missed out. Nintendo of Europe weighed a commercial appraisal and declined to publish, judging the text-heavy game not viable to localize. On the 3rd of March 2001, Nintendo and Rare announced that THQ would publish it, and THQ released it on the 6th of April 2001. As of February 2020, it was the fourth rarest Nintendo 64 title, with new copies fetching around $500 to $700 on bidding sites.

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• 8. Cult Afterlife

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  A score of 92 out of 100 at Metacritic, from 19 critics, shows how well the press received the game. IGN's Matt Casamassina gave it 9.9 out of 10 and called it "quite possibly the most hilarious title ever created". He also praised the level design, controls, graphics and sound. Many outlets called its visuals the best on the Nintendo 64. GameSpot said it "makes other Nintendo 64 games look like 16-bit software". Critics noted uncommon effects for the console, including dynamic shadowing, coloured lighting, long draw distance without fog, lip syncing, and individually rendered fingers on some characters. Casamassina singled out facial animation: when Conker is angry, players can see his teeth in a frown. Frame rate dips appeared, but most reviewers said they did not hurt play.

  Sound drew wide praise as well, for its accents, "dead-on" movie spoofs, and a soundtrack that shifted with location. Nintendojo noted voices that sounded identical to the film characters being spoofed. Many critics found the jokes clever, and GamePro called the missions "sublime satirical genius". Others found the humour juvenile, misogynistic, and thick with profanity. Next Generation's Chris Slate felt the shock would fade within an hour. Official Nintendo Magazine called it "a monster sized game", one that would make you laugh until you died or take months to finish.

  The context pads divided opinion. Casamassina said they kept the action "shifting, refreshing, and always exciting". GameRevolution's Johnny Liu liked the staccato flow between play and cutscenes. Edge dismissed the game as "little more than a procession of barely connected and puerile minigames". Critics also faulted the erratic camera, simple action, short length and linear structure. GameSpot said the camera could catch on objects, and the San Francisco Chronicle called the character hard to control on small platforms. Multiplayer got mixed reactions. Casamassina and Gameplanet praised its inventiveness, while GameSpot felt most modes "fail to stand the test of time".

  Awards followed. IGN named it Nintendo 64 Game of the Month, and it won best sound at the 2001 BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Awards. GameSpot gave it Best Platform Game for 2001, though it lost Best Story to Final Fantasy X and Best Nintendo 64 Game to Paper Mario. It also won Best Anthropomorphic Game at the Ursa Major Awards. At the 5th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, it lost to Halo: Combat Evolved and Ico in its two nominated categories.

  Later lists kept it high. Uproxx ranked it number 12 among Nintendo 64 games in 2021, using 250,849 user ratings. GameTrailers called it the funniest game in 2009, and UGO put its ending third on a 2010 list of weird endings. In 2013 Gaming Bolt named its water tube the 64th most challenging level in all gaming.

  Seavor planned a sequel, Conker's Other Bad Day, in which the new king wastes his money on beer, parties and hookers. After prison, he would escape with a ball and chain from the castle's highest tower. But Microsoft bought Rare in 2002 and said it had no interest in the project.

  The remake Conker: Live & Reloaded reached the Xbox in 2005. Porting was hard because the original's microcoded optimisations were tailored to Nintendo 64 hardware. Microsoft asked for several minor obscenities to be censored, and the remake added zoom, auto-targeting and Xbox Live multiplayer. A multiplayer-focused spinoff, Conker: Gettin' Medieval, was cancelled. Conker returned in the sandbox game Project Spark with Conker's Big Reunion, set ten years after Bad Fur Day. Seavor reprised his voices, the first episode arrived in April 2015, and the rest were cancelled that September. The original game finally received its first official re-release in the Rare Replay compilation for Xbox One, on the 4th of August 2015.

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