Listen to the squirrel

Although Nintendo systems are notorious for censoring and toning down adult or vulgar content, there have been various mature games released on its consoles. A recent example, to name just one, is Madworld on Wii, which had enough violence and bad language to keep any mature gaming fan happy.

If you want to go back to retro times, however, few are as popular and infamous as Conker's Bad Fur Day. No joke or reference seemed to be too vulgar or out of line for this title, and even the hero is a hungover squirrel; yet this was a game from Rare, one of Nintendo's go-to developers at that time. Rare had earned the right to do almost anything it wanted, mainly due to the fact it had produced titles such as Donkey Kong Country on Super NES and Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64.

Former Rare employee Donnchadh Murphy spoke to notenoughshaders.com about his career with the developer, and interestingly about the beginnings of Conker's Bad Fur Day, its evolution from the family-friendly Conker’s Quest/Twelve Tales and the freedom afforded to Rare by Nintendo.

I don’t remember much being cut. Most of those ideas came from Chris Seavor, he was the twisted genius who came up with them. I do remember us joking about the mighty poo, saying it would be hilarious if we had a giant pile of poo that sang classical music. Like a lot of the gags they started out as a joke, and then Chris would announce that it was going in the game, so I’d draw up some concepts and model up the characters and the rest is history.

...Back in those days Rare was the golden child, so when they announced that we were changing direction there was no objections, none that I knew about anyway. I’m so glad it did change, because “Twelve Tales”, to put it politely, was not a good game. Chris Seavor took the reins in BFD and took it a direction nobody expected.

Did you play Conker's Bad Fur Day back in the days of Nintendo 64? Did you love the humour and concept, or was it the gaming equivalent of an immovable furball?

[source notenoughshaders.com]