conker

Conker’s Bad Fur Day 2: Other Bad Day [Cancelled – GameCube, Xbox]

Conker’s Bad Fur Day 2: Other Bad Day [Cancelled – GameCube, Xbox]

Conker’s Bad Fur Day was one of the most fun and original games ever released on the Nintendo 64, a funny and “mature” game featuring cute characters survived from the cancelled Conker: Twelve Tales. After the first game was published in early 2001 the team started working on a sequel, at the time probably still planned to be released on the Nintendo Gamecube.

In early ’00s Tim and Chris Stamper were trying to sell Rare but Nintendo was not interested to fully own the company. On September 2002 Microsoft officially purchased Rare for $375 million and the studio became a first-party developer for their first console, the Xbox. Most of Rare’s games still in development were then moved to the Xbox (Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Kameo: Elements of Power, originally planned for Gamecube), possibly including Conker’s Bad Fur Day 2, also known as “Other Bad Day”.

Conker’s creator Chris Seavor and other former members of the Conker Team revealed the existence of their Conker sequel in many interviews, as in this old article from Mundo Rare:

 

“So we asked Chris Seavor what ever happened with Other Bad Day and why the hell is that we are not playing that game if everybody seems to want it. He answered that not only did they start working on a sequel with that title, they also had a full storyline ready to be depicted on the screen and many new movie references in mind: “We actually started on a direct sequel which was going to be called ‘Conker’s Other Bad Day‘ which dealt with Conker’s somewhat unsuccessful tenure as King. He spends all the treasury money on beer, parties and hookers. Thrown into prison, Conker is faced with the prospect of execution and the game starts with his escape, ball and chain attached, from the Castle’s highest tower.”

Thanks to an interview by Gamer Québec with Chris Seavor we know some more details about the planned story and characters in Conker’s Bad Fur Day 2:

 

“GQ: People want to know more about The Other Day, rightfully so. Rare had trademarked the name, but the sequel never happened. More than 10 years later, can you spoil what we were going to see as far as the story goes? Did it ever make it to a prototype?

CS: It had some graphics and concepts done for sure, but didn’t really get much further than that. As for what happened to Conker in OBD, well he became Emperor of the Known Universe, got a new girlfriend, and lost an old one (again). There was also a massive space poo: The Cthulpoo, the main baddie. Lots of other stuff happened, with some new characters appeared and old favourites returned. We got to find out about Greg’s childhood and why he hated cats, there were tons and tons of parodies of the more contemporary movies, and an evil doppleganger version of Conker that you got to play for a while. And Beardy (Birdy) died. That kinda stuff…

As with the original, it ended on a bittersweet note. I did actually do an act by act summary for you and the fans, but it was twice as big as the rest of the interview so i took it out… sorry. As consolation here’s a piccy of some early designs for the first level, just to prove we actually did do some work on the bugger.”

Conker's Bad Fur Day 2: Other Bad Day

We also know that some unused scenarios planned for Conker’s Bad Fur Day were meant to be re-used in Conker 2:

 

“As for features, I don’t think anything we really wanted to do didn’t end up in the game. There were a few levels that only existed on paper, for example one where Conker had to inflate a giant, fetish themed female pig by sticking a bellows up her arse. She then became a floating dirigible which you used to fly around the level dropping anvils on Cows to make them shit in the trough which then weighed down a lever and opened a door. This would have eventually leaded to the Bull Fight sequence. It got cut to save some time.

There were a few of these “linker” levels. Some eventually ended up in the design for Other Bad Day, but that’s never gonna happen so i guess you’ll never know…”

Unfortunately it seems that Microsoft was not interested in a Conker Sequel and soon the team dropped Other Bad Day, to work instead on a remake of the first Conker with major focus on its online multiplayer mode. We can assume Microsoft though the Xbox market would have been more interested in another multiplayer game, and a bonus remake of Bad Fur Day would have been less expensive to create than a full sequel.

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In June 2005 finally Conker: Live & Reloaded was published but it seems that since late 2004 the team was already trying to return to work on Conker’s Other Bad Day, without success. In November 2005 Microsoft would release their second console, the Xbox 360 and they asked Rare to move their projects to the new console, as it happened with Kameo. As we can read on another interview by Eurogamer with Chris:

 

“Chris Seavor: I started designing it [Conker 2] and we were going to do it. They just wanted it quickly. It was coming to the end of the life cycle of the Xbox, and there was talk of them going, look, can we just shift this over to the 360, which was a year away? I was really against that because I just couldn’t face spending another two years on a game we’d already spent a year and a half on. So I guess it was probably my fault.

Now, I would have gone, absolutely. Let’s take a step back and make the graphics look as good as we can. It would have done all right I think. From the amount of messages I get every day saying please make Conker 2 I’d say it would have been a better move, but hey. There you go.”

At the same time Rare started working on another multiplayer focused Conker titled “Gettin’ Medieval” as a sequel to “Live & Reloaded”, re-using some of the art and assets from the cancelled Conker’s BFD 2. Chris revealed during an interview with Rarefandabase:

 

“CS:Erm, well it was pretty much designed in outline…. The story, the levels, some of the gameplay (loosely) which movies were ripe for parody, and general tests for the graphics. A ton of artwork was done, which spilled over into the multiplayer only game called Getting Medieval, based in the Conker universe with Gregg the Grim Reaper as the principal protagonist rather than Conker.. It all got a bit messy and tbh I couldn’t face another 3 years of the squirrel and gang. Summat like that…. Not really sure when it stopped exactly, we just kinda moved onto something else. Looking back, probably should have stuck with Other Bad Day, but hey ho, we live and learn. What would I have expected? Erm… it would have been fucking brilliant and JK Rowling would definitely have sued… :)”

In the end even Conker: Gettin’ Medieval was cancelled, along with many other canned projects designed by Chris Seavor, such as Arc Angel, Quest, Urchin, Perfect Dark Core, and Ordinary Joe. After so many failed attempts to create new and original games, Chris left Rare in January 2011 when the company did not renew his contract. Later in 2012, Seavor finally opened his own indie studio called Gory Detail.

Fans of Conker the squirrel got a bit excited when Microsoft announced a DLC campaign titled “Conker’s Big Reunion” for their game-tool Project Spark. Even if Chris reprise his voice for Conker, only the first chapter of Big Reunion was ever released, as Project Spark was soon discontinued and the whole campaign failed to be completed.

Unfortunately this was not the end of the mismanagement of the Conker franchise, as in 2016 Microsoft announced “Young Conker” some kind of casual augmented reality game in development for the Microsoft HoloLens. Maybe this is really “Conker’s Baddest Day”.

Some more details and photos from the Conker’s Other Bad Day design doc were shared by Chris on Twitter:

  

Conker Bad Fur Day [N64 – Beta / Unused Stuff / Debug]

As we can read on Wikipedia, Conker’s Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64 was originally going to be titled Conker’s Quest and was later titled Twelve Tales: Conker 64. Early beta screenshots suggested the game would feature cute characters and colorful settings. Rare had a long history of making games of this sort, such as Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong Racing, and at first Conker did not appear to be any different. However, Rare started to fear that the game would simply get lost in the platforming crowd, and critical mockery of “yet another cute platformer” caused the original game to be drastically overhauled.

The promotional videos and pictures from Electronic Entertainment Expo (at the time when the game was still called Twelve Tales) revealed objects and characters which have influenced the released game. Objects such as the flower and mushroom sprites were seen in the promotional video and a character closely resembling Buga the Knut was seen chasing Conker (who was wearing a knight’s helmet) in a promotional picture. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is considerably a far different game from the original plans despite the small influences it had on the release game.

Even if the differences with Conker’s Quest / Twelve Tales beta are more obvious, Cubivore10 noticed some little beta differences in the early Conker Bad Fur Day too.

Here we can see that with the exception of Conker the whole screenshot has different textures, maybe be even reused from Twelve tales. The barn (pink roof) looks like it might even be shaped differently. (beta at the top, final at the bottom)

This one’s a bit odd. The only time the fire imps appear in any cutscenes are during the Bat’s Tower chapter. From what little I can see of the background its the boiler room still, but I NEVER recall the fire imps acting like this (I play that chapter on a regular basis FYI) It seems like something has shot off smoking and a fire imp is freaking out. Whatever is on fire by him appears to be burnt. The imps do become grey when Conker urinates on them, however, they don’t shoot off like that.

At about 4:36 in the video below, there is the scene with the fire imps :  it seems to be catching something in his mouth, whatever the smoking thing was.

This beta / unused cutscene was found still hidden in the final game by Goomther and ConkerGuru:

As wrote by Cubivore10:

This short scene was in an earlier trailer. I’m assuming, judging by the way it grows, you would have fought a giant Fire Imp as opposed to the Boiler at some point during development.

As wrote by Fuzzy, it’s quite short but in Goomther’s video it looks like the imp is eating another imp, but in the original it seems the imp is eating something like a burned rat.

Nothing much here, but unless he’s over more to the right than I recall, Birdy the scarecrow isn’t outside the bar.

Another minor detail, but in the final version of the game Gregg’s voice bubble is a dark gray color

The gray squirrel that Conker talks to is holding a walkie-talkie in the beta version (also the changed “tedizs” to “tediz”).

In the video below, at about 1:25 when Conker has to use his slingshot to open the vault, it doesn’t seem to be moving.

Also, Goomther found a weird / unfinished level in the game’s code, that could be an half-removed debug room! Check the video below for a look at this strange area. More unused models and development stuff were found by ConkerGuru in the game’s code (check his website for more!):

The tail of an very popular mouse pokémon. This tail was, according to an post on Chris Seavor’s twitter page, used for an cutscene they were forced to cut on nintendo’s request. When the cutscene played, the tail, obviously, would be placed on the back of the Pikachu model. Whatmore, Conker was also to interact with it during the scene, as there’s some unused animations remaining in the game of Conker sitting on his knees, and petting some creature.

Thanks to Cubivore10 and Goomther for the contributions!

Images (unused / beta models):

Videos:

 

Conker: Live And Reloaded [XBOX – Beta]

Conker: Live and Reloaded is a remake of Nintendo 64 game Conkers Bad Fur Day. When the game was 1st announced it was called Conker: Live and Uncut, and was intended to be completely uncut and remove all the censoring of the first game, its name was later changed to Conker: Live and Reloaded and had even more censoring than the original game. Throughout the games development there were many cuts and changes to the multiplayer mode.

While it was a remake, the single player game went through a number of changes mostly involving different textures or models, especially for Buga The Knut and his girl. Her lips are larger in the older picture, and her bra is leopardskin rather than a standard brownish color in the final version. Also her nipples are showing in the beta version (not only that, but Buga has chest hair in the beta shot). Conker-bat was black in the beta, as in the N64 game, but in the final version it’s orange.

Thanks a lot to Airfoemoe, Supermoe1998 and Karrunaniara for the contributions!

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Conker’s Quest / Twelve Tales [N64 – Cancelled]

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We all remember Conker Bad Fur Day as one of the most original (at least conceptually) games ever released on Nintendo 64. But we also remember how it looked before, when it was called Conker: Twelve Tales or Conker’s Quest: the quintessential cute-looking platform. However, apart from the graphic style, the first version of Conker had some interesting features not found in released version. The overworld was probably bigger and there were more levels, like, as you can seen from the screenshots on this page, a Toy and an Ice stage, more bosses,more moves and gadgets (including vehicles) for Conker. Also, the game was slightly different if played with Berry, the cute friend of Conkey, because she would have had to raise monsters in order to fight the enemies. The most significant feature was however the co-op mode, which allowed two players to cooperate in the adventure mode. Unfortunately, only some places and characters were ported to BFD, although with heavy changes, like the Scarecrow, the Cyclops (that became the giant boss of the prehistoric world), the windmill, many locations and gameplay ideas of the phehistoric world, etc. We can only hope that in the future a proto of this game will be leaked for everyone to enjoy.

Thanks to Cubivore10 for the contribution!

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NEW 30 MINUTE VIDEO!!! Huge props to IOnEIFalcon