Nintendo 64 · 1998 · Rare · Nintendo · Cancelled; retooled into Conker's Bad Fur Day
A cheerful, family-friendly Rare platformer starring a cute squirrel — cancelled because it was indistinguishable from every other Mario 64 clone, and reborn as one of the most obscene games Nintendo ever published.
Twelve Tales: Conker 64 was announced as Conker's Quest at E3 1997 and renamed in early 1998. It was exactly what Rare was expected to produce at that moment: a bright, colourful, family-friendly 3D platformer starring Conker, a cute red squirrel who had already appeared in Diddy Kong Racing, collecting things across cheerful worlds in the manner of Super Mario 64 and Rare's own Banjo-Kazooie. That was the problem. Rare struggled with the project — citing difficulties in project management — but the deeper issue was that the market had become saturated with Mario 64-style collect-a-thons, several of them made by Rare itself. Looking at what they had built, the team came to an uncomfortable conclusion: Twelve Tales was competent and completely unremarkable. It brought nothing to the genre that Banjo-Kazooie had not already done better. So they cancelled it and started again. What they did next is one of the most drastic creative pivots in the history of the medium. In 1999 Rare announced that the game would be entirely redesigned to appeal to an older audience — a claim so implausible that many assumed it was an April Fools' joke. It was not. Conker, formerly a wholesome children's character, was rebuilt as a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, fourth-wall-breaking alcoholic armed with guns, throwing knives, and a frying pan, and the game around him became a torrent of scatological humour, gore, and film parody. Conker's Bad Fur Day arrived in 2001, at the very end of the Nintendo 64's life, and it is astonishing that Nintendo published it at all. It sold poorly — a mature-rated game on a console owned overwhelmingly by children, released after most people had moved on — but it has become a cult classic and one of the most fondly remembered games on the platform. Twelve Tales was cancelled for being ordinary, and the decision to burn it down and start over produced something nobody else could have made.
Twelve Tales was not abandoned because it was broken. By all accounts it was a perfectly serviceable 3D platformer — bright, cheerful, and stuffed with collectibles, starring a cute squirrel in exactly the register the market expected of Rare in 1998. That was precisely the problem. The Mario 64 collect-a-thon had been done to exhaustion, in large part by Rare itself with Banjo-Kazooie, and the team recognised that their game brought nothing distinctive to a crowded field. Rather than ship something adequate and forgettable, they killed it — an unusually clear-eyed decision from a studio at the height of its commercial success.
The rebuild is what makes the story remarkable. In 1999 Rare announced that Conker would be redesigned entirely for an older audience, a claim so absurd that many took it for an April Fools' prank. The wholesome squirrel became a swearing, vomiting, gun-toting alcoholic; the cheerful platformer became a gleeful parade of scatological humour, gore, and shot-for-shot film parody. Conker's Bad Fur Day shipped in 2001 on a console owned mostly by children, sold badly, and became a cult classic — proof that the most interesting thing a studio can do with a mediocre game is have the nerve to destroy it.