How Did Rare Get Away With This?
Revisiting the Games That Shaped a Lifetime of Gaming
There was one thought that kept coming back to me throughout my return to Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
How did Rare get away with putting this on a Nintendo console?
Nintendo had built a reputation around games that could be enjoyed by almost anyone. Yet here was a Nintendo 64 game involving alcohol, swearing, violence, toilet humour and more than a few moments that made me wonder how some of it ever made it onto the cartridge.
And somehow, underneath all of that, there was still a very good game.
From Diddy Kong Racing to a Very Bad Day
Perhaps the strangest part is remembering where Conker started.
His first released appearance was in Diddy Kong Racing in 1997. There he was just another colourful Rare character racing around Timber’s Island alongside Diddy, Banjo, Krunch and the rest of the cast.
Nothing about that version of Conker suggested what was coming.
And Diddy Kong Racing wasn’t the only appearance of the more innocent Conker.
In 1999, he received his own adventure with Conker’s Pocket Tales for the Game Boy Color. Once again, this was the sort of colourful, family-friendly adventure you’d expect from a Rare character at the time. Conker was trying to recover his stolen birthday presents and rescue Berri after they were kidnapped by the Evil Acorn.
Then, two years later, Conker’s Bad Fur Day happened.
The tonal shift is enormous.
The cheerful squirrel from Diddy Kong Racing and Conker’s Pocket Tales was suddenly a heavy-drinking, foul-mouthed protagonist who begins his adventure hungover after a night in the pub and simply wants to find his way home.
Knowing what Conker had been before makes Bad Fur Day even more bizarre. Rare didn’t create a new adult character for this kind of game. They took an existing character who had already appeared in two family-friendly Nintendo games and completely reinvented him.
Things don’t exactly improve for Conker from there.
Rare Didn’t Hold Back
One thing I noticed throughout this playthrough was that whenever Bad Fur Day has an idea, it commits to it completely.
The game doesn’t seem particularly concerned about whether something is sensible.
Sometimes that works brilliantly. Sometimes I found myself wondering what I had just witnessed.
But it means the adventure is constantly changing. One moment Conker is platforming, the next he’s racing, dealing with dinosaurs, fighting the undead, carrying a shotgun, driving a tank or taking part in a war against the Tediz.
The game also wears its film influences proudly. The Tediz section suddenly turns Conker’s adventure into a war movie, while the final stretch throws in an unmistakable Matrix-style heist before eventually heading firmly into Alien territory.
It shouldn’t really fit together.
Somehow, in Bad Fur Day, it does.
There were certainly moments where the controls reminded me that I was playing a game from the Nintendo 64 era, particularly when the game started demanding more precise movement or shooting. At times, controlling Conker could feel like another obstacle that needed to be survived.
But there was always something new waiting around the corner.
Gregg the Grim Reaper
Gregg might be one of my favourite examples of the game’s humour.
When you hear that you’re about to meet the Grim Reaper, you probably have a fairly good idea of what to expect.
Gregg is almost the complete opposite.
He’s tiny, has a voice you wouldn’t normally associate with the personification of death, and behaves less like a terrifying supernatural entity and more like an irritated employee who has been stuck doing the same job for far too long.
He also hates cats.
Not because there’s anything particularly sinister about them, but because having nine lives creates more work for him.
Later in the adventure, Gregg returns and hands Conker a shotgun so he can deal with the undead.
At that point, it barely seemed unusual anymore.
The Great Mighty Poo
Of course, there is one character that can’t really be avoided when talking about Conker’s Bad Fur Day.
The Great Mighty Poo.
By the time I reached him, I thought I’d developed a reasonable understanding of the sort of things this game was willing to throw at me.
Then I had to fight an opera-singing pile of poo.
There’s something almost admirable about how completely Rare commits to the idea. This isn’t a quick joke before the game moves on. The Great Mighty Poo gets an entire boss battle built around his performance while Conker fights back using toilet rolls.
It’s juvenile. It’s ridiculous. And it’s also one of the most memorable encounters in the entire game.
More than twenty-five years after Bad Fur Day was released, the fact that an opera-singing pile of poo remains one of its most recognisable moments probably tells you everything you need to know about this game.
Then Things Get Dark
For all the toilet humour, film references and general insanity, Bad Fur Day becomes surprisingly dark as the adventure progresses.
The war against the Tediz is probably where that becomes most obvious. Conker goes from dealing with increasingly ridiculous situations to being dropped into something that feels like Rare’s version of a war film.
There are Tediz, flamethrowers, lasers, machine guns and eventually a tank.
By the final stretch, the game changes again.
A Matrix-style heist eventually brings Conker face to face with the Panther King, only for Heinrich to make sure that encounter doesn’t go quite according to plan.
That leaves Conker with one final battle.
And after everything the game had thrown at me, fighting an alien felt like an entirely appropriate way for it to end.
Being King Wasn’t Quite the Happy Ending
The ending might be one of the most surprising things about Bad Fur Day.
Conker wins.
He becomes king.
On paper, that’s the sort of ending you’d expect from a platforming adventure.
Except Conker isn’t particularly happy about it.
Berri is gone, and when Conker is given the opportunity to change what happened, he realises too late that he forgot to ask for her back.
After spending the entire game trying to get home, he ends up sitting on a throne surrounded by characters from his adventure, reflecting on what he’s lost.
It’s an unexpectedly bleak conclusion for a game that contains an opera-singing pile of poo.
The Other Bad Day That Never Happened
While looking through walkthroughs during this playthrough to jog my memory about what was coming next, I discovered something I hadn’t realised before.
There was supposed to be another bad day.
Rare had plans for a proper sequel, commonly known as Conker’s Other Bad Day, which would have continued Conker’s story after the ending of the original.
It never happened.
Instead, Bad Fur Day eventually returned through Conker: Live & Reloaded, but the planned continuation of Conker’s story was left behind.
Knowing that makes the ending of Bad Fur Day slightly more interesting to me. Conker’s story ends in a deliberately uncomfortable place, and there was once an intention to show what happened afterwards.
We’re still waiting.
The Journey
This return to Conker’s Bad Fur Day was recorded as a complete no-commentary playthrough. If you’d like to experience Conker’s increasingly unfortunate adventure from beginning to end, you can watch the full playlist on YouTube.
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â–¶ Watch the complete Conker’s Bad Fur Day playthrough on YouTube
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One Bad Fur Day Later
When the credits finally rolled, there weren’t any tears of joy this time.
I was just pleased I’d finished it.
And I don’t mean that negatively.
Conker’s Bad Fur Day had taken me through one of the strangest adventures I’ve revisited so far. I’d fought cavemen, dinosaurs, zombies, Tediz and an opera-singing pile of poo. I’d driven a tank, survived a war, taken part in a Matrix-style heist and eventually fought an alien.
Some parts have aged better than others. The controls occasionally tested my patience, and there were definitely moments where I was fighting the game almost as much as whatever happened to be standing in front of Conker.
But I can understand why Bad Fur Day developed the reputation it has.
There really isn’t much else like it.
Rare took the innocent little squirrel who had appeared in Diddy Kong Racing and Conker’s Pocket Tales, gave him the worst hangover imaginable, and sent him through an adventure that somehow became progressively more ridiculous and darker at the same time.
More than twenty-five years later, I’m still not entirely sure how they got away with putting it on a Nintendo console.
I’m glad they did.
