The History of Conker's Bad Fur Day
Conker's Bad Fur Day launched in North America on March 5, 2001, published by Rare itself, and in Europe on April 6 under THQ. There was no Japanese release. Directed and designed by Chris Seavor, with music by Robin Beanland, it took the studio's mascot platformer machinery and aimed it squarely at adults: a hungover squirrel, a trail of cash, and a warning printed on the box. It scored a 92 on Metacritic, was called quite possibly the funniest game ever made, and sold only about 55,000 copies in its first month.
THE ONE COVER
America only, by design
THE RETOOL
From Twelve Tales to a bad fur dayConker arrived at E3 1997 as Conker's Quest and at E3 1998 as Twelve Tales: Conker 64, a gentle family game in the Banjo mould, and the previews were polite to the point of dismissal: too cute, too similar. Chris Seavor came onto the project as designer, a beehive level gained wasps with machine guns, the team found it funny, and they kept going. By early 2000 the retooled game was announced. Seavor has said that almost all of the writing survived the change of direction; what changed was the target. The full story is on this shelf's Conker question page.
As a platformer it is deliberately plain: where Banjo stacked abilities, Conker mostly walks up to a marked pad and presses B, and the game becomes whatever the pad says, a turret, a tank, a film parody. Critics split on that choice. IGN gave it a 9.9 and the graphics were widely called the best on the Nintendo 64, dynamic shadows, coloured lighting, lip-synced faces and individually modelled fingers on a cartridge. Edge, dissenting, called the pads a procession of barely connected minigames.
THE SELL
Bars, Playboy, and a refusalThe marketing matched the rating and aimed at college students: bars, campuses, late-night television, adult magazines, and a Playboy tour across twenty colleges, on a budget of about five million dollars. The gatekeepers pushed back in ways that became part of the legend. Nintendo of America declined to cover the game in Nintendo Power. KB Toys refused to stock it. Nintendo of Europe declined to publish it at all, judging a text-heavy adult comedy not commercially viable to localise, which is how THQ's name ended up on the European box.
The result was a strange split: the best-selling mature-rated game of its first month, and only about 55,000 copies in that month, squeezed by an expensive 64MB cartridge, advertising that could only run where adults were, and a console at the end of its life. The afterlife corrected the launch. Bad Fur Day became a cult title and one of the rarest games on the system, a February 2020 account ranking it the fourth rarest Nintendo 64 title with sealed copies in the 500 to 700 dollar range at that time. Japan never got the chance to ignore it: no edition was ever made.