F@%^ing Conker
BAD FUR Day AND LIVE & RELOADED
Chris Seavor on creating a N64 masterpiece and remaking it for Microsoft’s Xbox
BACK IN THE GOLDEN ERA OF 3D PLATFORMERS, ONE IDIOTIC LITTLE SQUIRREL REIGNED SUPREME…LY DRUNK. IAN DRANSFIELD SPOKE WITH CONKER’S CREATOR TO RELOAD A BAD FUR DAY
How different it all could have been in Conker the squirrel’s life. He might have come to be known to us as a foul-mouthed alcoholic rat of the trees, but the ginger drunkard’s actual debut in gaming was behind the wheel in Diddy Kong Racing, before showing up clean cut and worried his birthday party might be ruined by a giant acorn (no, really) in Game Boy Color title Conker’s Pocket Tales. Safe to say, somewhere along the way Conker hit a few bumps in the road, and his life took a turn for the… more expletive-ridden, let’s say.
But it wasn’t intended to be that way. Rare had made strides into developing Twelve Tales: Conker – a more standard three-dimensional platformer that fit in well with what the studio had been pumping out in recent years. That very fact ended up being the genesis of Conker, as fans reacted with boredom to the idea of yet another cutesy-cutesy game from Rare. Banjo-kazooie was out there and its team was already at work on Donkey Kong 64, while it was, in the most part, the Killer Instinct team working on Conker. The switch from cutesy to ultraviolent arrived with consummate ease.
“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 a bit facetious, of course, but it serves to illustrate the state of play at that moment,” says Chris Seavor, creator of Conker – as well as vocal talent behind all male characters in Bad Fur Day barring one particular singing lump of poo. “Twelve Tales,” he continued, “even though it was more similar to Mario 64 in terms of tone than [cancelled 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, so Twelve Tales had to go – certainly in the form it was in.”
But the foul-mouthed superstar’s turn under, of all things, the Nintendo banner wasn’t just a case of two cutesy platformers at once – it was a logistical decision, too. “Banjo looked more likely to get done,” Chris said, “And to be honest they’d sailed past us content and graphics-wise, while the Twelve Tales team had fought among themselves. In the end, it was a simple matter of change or die… so we changed.”
That change certainly wasn’t to something you would associate naturally with Nintendo, but Chris and the team at Rare was trusted enough thanks to recent successes to just get on with things. Aside from the odd snide comment and some perceived mistrust on the Nintendo Of America side of things, development of the mature-rated, swearing-heavy Bad Fur Day went ahead with little to no corporate interference. This meant that the two-year development period – much shorter than the perceived time it took, thanks to the initial work on (and scrapping of) Twelve Tales – was relatively smooth and lacking in any major hurdles from beginning to end. Which isn’t exactly the sort of story you’d think to associate with such an anarchic, chaotic game as Conker’s Bad Fur Day, but there you go.
As development moved from a traditional cutesy title to one featuring sex and booze and copious cursing, you’d be forgiven for thinking the main
“BANJO WAS TIM STAMPER’S BABY, SO TWELVE TALES HAD TO GO”
Chris Seavor
character would move away from being an anthropomorphised rodent. But no: “That was one of the few things that carried over from Twelve Tales,” Chris explains, “Where the squirreliness of Conker 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 Twelve Tales, he became a lot more cutesy in Bad Fur Day, which juxtaposed nicely with the actual tone of the game. He’d also been trademarked, which ain’t cheap.”
To set Bad Fur Day apart from its contemporaries – not least of which those from Rare itself – Chris and the team added a few unique characteristics to the game. Vocal talents being provided in the most part by the game’s creator helped to keep a consistent (low)
tone, while the free rein offered by Rare and Nintendo meant your usual closed off in-game world was opened up for the real one to encroach. To say Conker’s Bad Fur Day featured references would be like saying the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan is a smidge unsettling. Fittingly enough, the Saving Private Rodent scene in Conker’s Bad Fur Day is just as harrowing as its inspiration – and with good reason, as Chris explains: “The amount of work that went into that whole set-piece was a game’s worth in itself.” Sadly, we never were able to see the Harry ‘Abraca-fucking-dabra’ Potter parody Chris wanted to introduce in Bad Fur Day’s sequel.
But this wasn’t just japes and jokery at the expense of popular culture – a game was being made and technical challenges had to be overcome. For Chris, it was (apparently) simple things like fitting all of Bad Fur Day into the N64’s relatively paltry memory – especially when Rare’s own Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark both required the additional RAM pack in order to run properly. “We used full speech as well,” Chris says, “and that shit ain’t cheap! The Coders used some form of dark magic I reckon, which they still won’t admit to.”
Chris himself didn’t work on the coding side of things, so his personal challenges from the time working on Bad Fur Day were more focused on making the narrative side of things mesh with the mechanical side. “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,” he explains, “There’s no greater disappointment in any game than the moment the illusion of immersion drops, and all that’s left is little more than a chart and some numbers. To be a good designer – for me – has always been the ability to be the person behind the curtain who, right to the very end credits, you pay no attention to.”
With that design responsibility comes the need to cut, of course, and Conker’s original cut for N64 was around 20 per cent bigger than what ended up in shops. While mostly designs and ideas just on paper, Hell and Gregg had their own expanded sections, the prune-filled battle with the bull was more extensive,
the inside of the windmill featured more character and storyline interactions, “Time was – and is – always the great enemy,” Chris laments.
As if all of this wasn’t being ambitious enough, Chris and his Rare colleagues decided they wanted to bring something else to Bad Fur Day that people probably wouldn’t be expecting – multiplayer. “I had some ideas I thought might be fun that would only really work with multiplayer,” Chris says. “Plus it was becoming a staple thing with games at the time. I was also playing lots of first-person shooters online at the time and thought it could be interesting territory for future games. A place to experiment and get the tech going, so to speak,” he adds.
This experiment became a surprise hit for the N64 game, though it wouldn’t reach its stride until a certain remake landed a few years later. Bad Fur Day with friends was a nice complimentary mode to the single-player story, allowing players to see characters working and interacting in a different way. “It wasn’t just some tagged-on, box-ticking exercise,” Chris says. “Plus, you get to pee on your friends virtually, which people might find fun. Maybe?”
“IT WASN’T JUST SOME TAGGED-ON, BOX-TICKING EXERCISE” Chris Seavor
Conker’s Bad Fur Day went down very well on its release in 2001, surprising Nintendo and Rare’s fans as much as it delighted them. The mix of diverse game mechanics, fully voiced characters, crass humour, movie and pop culture references, the Rare pedigree and a few other bits and pieces made for a ready made cult classic: too offensive to be up there with the Mario 64s of the world, but too good to be ignored or forgotten. Which is why it was little surprise when, after Microsoft picked up Rare in 2002, Conker made his comeback on the American company’s console, the Xbox.
Rather than a hasty rerelease, Conker Live & Reloaded was a much more involved, deeper process of… well, starting again. “We started from scratch,” Chris explains, “And I completely redesigned the multiplayer into things as a whole new game on top of that. So yeah, it was difficult.” And it was, quite fittingly, handled with a bit of minor subterfuge from Chris, who worried the team wouldn’t buy into the prospect of creating so much over again after having, effectively, already worked on the game once before. “I did the Gandalf/beorn trick and gradually introduced the new stuff as we developed (and as the team expanded). But right from the start, I knew what I wanted to do.”
This approach was something still pretty new back in 2005, with high-def – or at least higher res – remakes not ten a penny like today. Live & Reloaded might not be able to take the award for being the first of these remakes, but it
“I liked the bleeps because they left things to your imagination” Chris Seavor
certainly set a high standard in most regards, and – aside from the very odd 4/10 Eurogamer review – was well received by Xbox owners and Conker aficionados alike.
One sticking point for fans of the original, though, was the move to censor more of the game than first time around. While plenty of Bad Fur Day was bleeped and obscured from impressionable ears and eyes, Live & Reloaded cut out more of the swears – for many diminishing the shock factor of the initial release. One person not saddened by this move, though, was Chris himself: “Some of that was me,” he admits, “I liked the bleeps because they left things to your imagination, and usually that’s a lot worse than anything we could actually say. I’ve never really understood why people have a problem with some of the added bleeps – it was pretty minor.”
An addition to Live & Reloaded that wasn’t so minor, though, was that of multiplayer. While it had existed in Bad Fur Day, the power of Xbox Live and the explosion in popularity of online console gaming meant there was a ready made – and huge – market out there for a good ol’ game of cutesy animals decapitating one another. For the second time in two releases, Conker’s multiplayer was better than it had any right to be, and Chris puts a big part of that down to Microsoft’s online backbone. “Xbox Live was and is the best thing about the Xbox platform,” he says, “They nailed it when they created that service so it would be rather churlish of me not to take advantage of it.”
Take advantage Chris did, with Live & Reloaded’s multiplayer offering a number of different modes and Team Fortress-style character classes – each with different weapons, abilities and attributes. “I just dipped into the vast vista of multiplayer games I’d been playing over the previous five or so years,” Chris explains, “Like Team Fortress, Counter-strike and Planetside – and I extracted what I liked and left what I didn’t. I think it worked well, and definitely kept the flavour of the world but also had a depth that meant people wouldn’t play for five minutes and get bored... hopefully.”
Of course with such an undertaking – and such a focus on making it a mode actually worth playing – came a great deal of struggle for the development team. “Multiplayer map design is very, very difficult,” Chris laughs. “It’s difficult. It really is. I can’t say any more than that. Oh wait, did I mention it’s really difficult? It is. Everyone go and sit down with a blank piece of paper and a pencil and design a multiplayer map. You’ll see what I mean.” But it was, in the end, totally worth it – the multiplayer portion of Live & Reloaded saw a healthy population taking part in its ludicrous action for years after the game’s release, and even after the release of the Xbox 360.
Conker: Live & Reloaded was a beautiful and surprisingly ambitious remake of a cult classic, but – and this was the same for Bad Fur Day – it didn’t do too well in the all important sales department. Both games came out in the twilight of their respective consoles’ lifespans, neither received a huge marketing push and both ended up beloved by those who played them, but in too few homes to make it viable to make any more games in the series. Two sequels – Conker’s Other Bad Day and Conker: Gettin’ Medieval – were cancelled. The squirrel had, finally, run out of those seemingly-endless lives he so enjoyed to abuse.
That was until 2014, when Conker returned to the fore at a number of Microsoft’s presentations. What was initially believed to be a brand-new, full game featuring everyone’s favourite furry little bastard was soon revealed to be a bitty, piece-by-piece release for the Xbox One’s Project Spark usergenerated content software-turnedgame. While featuring some level of Conker’s old attitude, it was heavily sanitised and appeared as little more than a corporate-approved showing of a cult favourite mascot. When Project Spark – and Conker’s Big Reunion, as it was officially known – died a death, very few shed a tear.
Since then we’ve been twiddling our thumbs to see what else comes of the aspiring table leg – there’s a ‘Young Conker’ demonstration for Microsoft’s Hololens, but a) it isn’t Conker and b) it’s something only developers and hardcore tech enthusiasts will play. Sadly, the return of our drunken pal does seem to be something we will never actually, really see – at least not under the watch of his current owners in Redmond.
One thing Microsoft should bear in mind, though, is that the series’ creator is ready and willing to take up the helm for a third true Conker game: “I have my own little venture at the moment, Gory Detail – check us out – and our next game after The Unlikely Legend Of Rusty Pup is going to be a more traditional side-scrolling platformer/beat-’em-up with a twist,” Chris explains, “For a laugh, though, our first placeholder asset is going to be a certain teenage (prequel) squirrel, just to wind the fans up! But if Microsoft wants to throw some cash at us to do it for real, well – never say never. Plus I know someone who can do a really good Conker voice.”
Thanks to Chris Seavor. Find him on Twitter @conkerhimself, while studio Gory Detail can be found at @Gorydetail and gory-detail.com. The Unlikely Legend Of Rusty Pup will be released… “some time this year”, according to Chris.