March 5, 2001: Rated M for Manure
by Diamond Feit
I've accumulated a number of passions in my life, some of which I elected to pursue out of curiosity while others simply came to me on account of my upbringing. I don't think you could grow up in the era that I did and not immediately fall in love with arcade games; their sheer omnipresence and attention-grabbing nature drew me in like high-quality bait lures a marlin onto a hook.
Yet if anything rivaled video games in my young eyes, it was the art of comedy. Again, the growth of cable television and commercial enthusiasm for the medium nurtured a comedy boom in the 1980s, but I developed a fascination with all manner of amusements as my brain developed a personality.
My hunger for humor motivated me to consume it as often as possible from as many sources as I could find. Every trip to the grocery store offered me an opportunity to grab the latest MAD Magazine. HBO and MTV introduced me to a parade of stand-up comics, all with their own distinct delivery and material. I further supplemented this by scanning the comedy aisle in our local video store for anything my parents would let me take home. In the days before in-flight video-on-demand, I always sought out the comedy channel when I sat on an airplane and listened to it on a loop from takeoff until landing.
Given the subjective nature of what people find funny, I understand why so few developers try to make people laugh with their video games. Simulating a sport or a war is just easier than meticulously crafting jokes and executing them with proper timing\u2014to say nothing of the challenges localization and cultural baggage poses to putting smiles on the faces of a global audience. I had friends who swore to me that computer games offered great gags, but without the proper hardware I spent my youth playing mostly console games where I seldom found any hilarity.
25 years ago this week, a bold experiment challenging that paradigm landed on store shelves. Published by a Japanese company but developed in the United Kingdom, Conker's Bad Fur Day pointed its comedy crosshairs at cutesy platformers, pop culture, and the medium of video games as a whole.
The saga of Conker's Bad Fur Day begins with an extended parody of A Clockwork Orange as the camera slowly pans out from an angry-looking squirrel sitting on a throne wearing a crown atop his head slightly askew. This is our protagonist, previously introduced in Diddy Kong Racing and later starring in his own Game Boy adventure, Conker's Pocket Tales. Needless to say, a lot has happened in his life since those bygone days.
Through a voiceover, Conker tells us that he's \"king of all the land\" but explains that his rise to power only started yesterday. We jump back 24 hours and witness Conker leave a message for his squeeze Berri on her answering machine. He's having a night out at the pub with \"a couple of guys\" (whom we do not see) and he's not going to make it home on time. Indeed, he won't make it home at all.
An inebriated Conker stumbles out of the pub and wanders into unknown territory when players finally take control of the action. Isolated and barely mobile, Conker encounters an equally-hammered scarecrow named Birdy who clues us in to the game's \"context sensitive\" buttons. Standing on a circle marked B and pressing the B button will prompt Conker to perform a specific task relative to the situation. At present, this entails offering more drinks to Birdy and downing a glass of sodium bicarbonate to clear his own head.
Conker\u2014now ambulatory again\u2014resumes his quest to either find Berri or his own home, whichever comes first. Exploring this small area triggers short tutorial messages as Conker remembers or Birdy reminds him of his other abilities. Conker can spin his tail to slow his descent mid-air, crouch before jumping to leap extra high, or whip out a frying pan from his pocket to wallop any obstacles blocking his way. In classic cartoon character logic, Conker holds an infinite number of items on his squirrel-person regardless of their mass, including but not limited to flamethrowers, machine guns, and the ever-popular anvil.
Having established Conker's basic moveset and motivation, Bad Fur Day lets players decide where to go next. It's not quite an open-world situation as impassable obstacles and Conker's own internal monologue will nudge players towards certain destinations, but I appreciate when a game lets me take the wrong path instead of putting up an arbitrary roadblock. It feels more rewarding when I discover which events trigger progress instead of a quest marker guiding my hand.
That said, Bad Fur Day's story unfolds in very rigid spurts, often whisking Conker into a new area and assigning him a task to complete before he may return to the opening zone. There are also cutaways to a sinister panther sitting on a throne in a castle, presumably the same throne Conker will usurp by game's end. Conker and the Panther King spend most of the runtime unaware of each other, making these villain scenes drag and the pair's eventual meeting utterly anti-climactic.
A charitable reading of Conker's Bad Fur Day might argue that establishing a hero who doesn't even realize he has a nemesis subverts player expectations, but in practice it saps my ability to invest any emotion in the scenario at hand. When the bad guy has no master plan or any grudge against the protagonist and the leading squirrel in turn expresses no interest in becoming king, the events that follow lack tension.
If Conker's Bad Fur Day offset this shortcoming with non-stop gags, I'd chuckle and offer it a pass, but the truth is I found shockingly few laughs in this game that boasts of its \"twisted humor\" on the back of the box. Conker's frequent social interactions bring the game to a complete halt as stranger after stranger begs Conker for help even though he's just met them. You'd expect these fully-voiced conversations to offer an abundance of comic opportunities but actual jokes often take a backseat to profanity masquerading as a punchline.
Let us remember that in the 90s, shock humor grew widespread as creative teams pushed back against conservative broadcast standards. Before The Simpsons became comedy royalty, its early seasons ruffled sitting politicians because it dared to have a cartoon boy sass his parents and teachers. When South Park introduced an entire town of foul-mouthed paper cutouts, it became front-page news.
Compared to what kids were watching on television during this time, video games kept things remarkably clean-cut. Violence in the medium certainly caused an uproar, but swear words, sex scenes, and scatological humor were scarce on home consoles\u2014especially those made by Nintendo. The Kyoto-based company's American branch relaxed many of its overreaching content restrictions when it saw that the demand for Mortal Kombat exceeded expectations, but it retained an air of family-friendliness for many years afterwards, often to its detriment.
Developer Rare\u2014a reliable partner to Nintendo\u2014achieved great success in the late 90s with titles aimed at older audiences. Killer Instinct, GoldenEye 007, and Perfect Dark all bore the Nintendo seal of quality even though they contained guns and gore. Yet Rare proved just as adept at delivering adventures starring adorable animals such as the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Banjo-Kazooie, and the aforementioned Diddy Kong Racing.
Conker's Bad Fur Day began life as an example of the latter, originally announced as Conker's Quest in 1997 then retitled Twelve Tales: Conker 64 the following year. Within months of the rebranding, however, the press noticed Conker's absence from the upcoming release schedule. Behind the scenes at Rare, disagreements about the game's content led to delays. Project Leader and Game Designer Chris Seavor told Retro Gamer magazine in 2017 that the project's similarities to Banjo-Kazooie meant that only one of the two would make it to retail. \"It was a simple matter of change or die,\" Seavor said, \"so we changed.\"
In a 2012 interview with website Gamikia, Seavor further outlined Conker's need to stand apart from other 3D platformers. \"The trick with any new game when you\u2019re trying to pitch it,\" Seavor said, \"is: What does this game do that\u2019s different to its competitors? Humour, toilet or otherwise, was ours.\" Hence Rare transformed Conker's nut-collecting nature walk into a yarn about a hungover squirrel bumbling his way through a storybook world where everyone's salty, horny, or out for blood.
Taste is a notoriously subjective matter and that goes double for comedy. I've spent many an afternoon enjoying an American movie in a Japanese theater and drawn stares because I'm laughing my ass off while my fellow patrons sit in perfect silence. Conversely, I've heard my family giggle and guffaw as Japanese comedians on television make funny faces and fall down. No one joke can possibly hit all audiences equally.
However, I truly believe that Conker's Bad Fur Day fails as a comedy because it doubles down on trends that were already waning by its 2001 release. Nothing has a shorter shelf life than shock value. The raunchy teen movies I watched as a kid at sleepovers pale in comparison to the ejaculation-based gags enjoyed by mainstream moviegoers in the late 90s. This led Canadian prankster Tom Green to satirize that shift by starring, writing, and directing \"the stupidest, most disgusting movie you\u2019ve ever seen.\"
Conker's Bad Fur Day, on the other hand, plays out like any number of other video games except the cute critters on screen get drunk, bleed, and go to the bathroom a lot. They pepper their dialogue with \"shit\" and \"asshole\" but never an f-bomb; those are bleeped out. A few of them drop trow and show off their butts but none of them bare their breasts or expose their genitals\u2014though one caveman comes close. I won't judge you if you're snickering right now but I couldn't muster a smirk at any of these moments.
Critics by and large disagreed with my take, lauding Conker's Bad Fur Day with high scores and higher praise in their reviews. For IGN, Matt Casamassina called it \"a devilishly funny 3D platformer with an intelligent edge\" in a 9.9 review (out of 10). GamePro's Star Dingo awarded Conker's Bad Fur Day a perfect 5.0 across the board, declaring that \"there\u2019s sublime satirical genius at work here.\" A 2009 retrospective by Thomas Bowskill declared Bad Fur Day a \"timeless classic\" and rated it 9/10 stars.
It's easy to take one look at Conker's Bad Fur Day 25 years after its debut and dismiss it as a product of its time, but I do admire Rare's gusto. They saw the market for cheery, happy collectathons as over-saturated and instead opted to cast a net in untested waters. Nintendo omitted any mention of the \"adult\" title in Nintendo Power in favor of an aggressive marketing campaign targeting teens and young adults. The gamble did not pay off commercially; few shoppers were still willing to spend $69.95 on Nintendo 64 software in 2001 with two PlayStations and one Dreamcast offering games for far less.
I doubt any large publisher today would dare commit the necessary cash towards such a risky proposition, not without an established brand name attached. Of course, if Rare had pitched a game where Donkey Kong pissed on Zingers and threw feces at King K. Rool, Nintendo would've told them to jump in a lake.
The good news is that digital distribution and the proliferation of indies means anyone today can make a game as funny or outrageous as they like without worrying about toy stores refusing to stock the finished product. The bad news is it's harder than ever to make a game that stands out amongst a sea of daily releases. That, and if you fly too close to the sun your work might get banned on the whims of a corporation or an overseas payment processor.
In that light, I tip my hat to Rare and Conker for walking a tightrope and delivering a game that clearly amused thousands of people while still pleasing the suits in Kyoto, Japan and Redmond, Washington. After Microsoft acquired Rare for $375 million in 2002, the studio remade Bad Fur Day for the Xbox under the new title Conker: Live & Reloaded. The promise of better graphics, additional multiplayer modes, and support for online combat didn't move the needle in the sales department, however, and subsequent sequels never made it past the prototype phase.
Honestly, the end of Conker's saga fills me with sadness. The jokes didn't land for me but I'd rather revisit Conker's Bad Fur Day or see a new squirrellish outing than play any of Rare's recent output under the thumb of Microsoft, that's for certain.
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.
", "contentSnippet": "March 5, 2001: Rated M for Manure\nby Diamond Feit \nI've accumulated a number of passions in my life, some of which I elected to pursue out of curiosity while others simply came to me on account of my upbringing. I don't think you could grow up in the era that I did and not immediately fall in love with arcade games; their sheer omnipresence and attention-grabbing nature drew me in like high-quality bait lures a marlin onto a hook.\nYet if anything rivaled video games in my young eyes, it was the art of comedy. Again, the growth of cable television and commercial enthusiasm for the medium nurtured a comedy boom in the 1980s, but I developed a fascination with all manner of amusements as my brain developed a personality.\nMy hunger for humor motivated me to consume it as often as possible from as many sources as I could find. Every trip to the grocery store offered me an opportunity to grab the latest MAD Magazine. HBO and MTV introduced me to a parade of stand-up comics, all with their own distinct delivery and material. I further supplemented this by scanning the comedy aisle in our local video store for anything my parents would let me take home. In the days before in-flight video-on-demand, I always sought out the comedy channel when I sat on an airplane and listened to it on a loop from takeoff until landing.\nGiven the subjective nature of what people find funny, I understand why so few developers try to make people laugh with their video games. Simulating a sport or a war is just easier than meticulously crafting jokes and executing them with proper timing\u2014to say nothing of the challenges localization and cultural baggage poses to putting smiles on the faces of a global audience. I had friends who swore to me that computer games offered great gags, but without the proper hardware I spent my youth playing mostly console games where I seldom found any hilarity.\n25 years ago this week, a bold experiment challenging that paradigm landed on store shelves. Published by a Japanese company but developed in the United Kingdom, Conker's Bad Fur Day pointed its comedy crosshairs at cutesy platformers, pop culture, and the medium of video games as a whole.\nThe saga of Conker's Bad Fur Day begins with an extended parody of A Clockwork Orange as the camera slowly pans out from an angry-looking squirrel sitting on a throne wearing a crown atop his head slightly askew. This is our protagonist, previously introduced in Diddy Kong Racing and later starring in his own Game Boy adventure, Conker's Pocket Tales. Needless to say, a lot has happened in his life since those bygone days.\nThrough a voiceover, Conker tells us that he's \"king of all the land\" but explains that his rise to power only started yesterday. We jump back 24 hours and witness Conker leave a message for his squeeze Berri on her answering machine. He's having a night out at the pub with \"a couple of guys\" (whom we do not see) and he's not going to make it home on time. Indeed, he won't make it home at all.\nAn inebriated Conker stumbles out of the pub and wanders into unknown territory when players finally take control of the action. Isolated and barely mobile, Conker encounters an equally-hammered scarecrow named Birdy who clues us in to the game's \"context sensitive\" buttons. Standing on a circle marked B and pressing the B button will prompt Conker to perform a specific task relative to the situation. At present, this entails offering more drinks to Birdy and downing a glass of sodium bicarbonate to clear his own head.\nConker\u2014now ambulatory again\u2014resumes his quest to either find Berri or his own home, whichever comes first. Exploring this small area triggers short tutorial messages as Conker remembers or Birdy reminds him of his other abilities. Conker can spin his tail to slow his descent mid-air, crouch before jumping to leap extra high, or whip out a frying pan from his pocket to wallop any obstacles blocking his way. In classic cartoon character logic, Conker holds an infinite number of items on his squirrel-person regardless of their mass, including but not limited to flamethrowers, machine guns, and the ever-popular anvil.\nHaving established Conker's basic moveset and motivation, Bad Fur Day lets players decide where to go next. It's not quite an open-world situation as impassable obstacles and Conker's own internal monologue will nudge players towards certain destinations, but I appreciate when a game lets me take the wrong path instead of putting up an arbitrary roadblock. It feels more rewarding when I discover which events trigger progress instead of a quest marker guiding my hand.\nThat said, Bad Fur Day's story unfolds in very rigid spurts, often whisking Conker into a new area and assigning him a task to complete before he may return to the opening zone. There are also cutaways to a sinister panther sitting on a throne in a castle, presumably the same throne Conker will usurp by game's end. Conker and the Panther King spend most of the runtime unaware of each other, making these villain scenes drag and the pair's eventual meeting utterly anti-climactic.\nA charitable reading of Conker's Bad Fur Day might argue that establishing a hero who doesn't even realize he has a nemesis subverts player expectations, but in practice it saps my ability to invest any emotion in the scenario at hand. When the bad guy has no master plan or any grudge against the protagonist and the leading squirrel in turn expresses no interest in becoming king, the events that follow lack tension.\nIf Conker's Bad Fur Day offset this shortcoming with non-stop gags, I'd chuckle and offer it a pass, but the truth is I found shockingly few laughs in this game that boasts of its \"twisted humor\" on the back of the box. Conker's frequent social interactions bring the game to a complete halt as stranger after stranger begs Conker for help even though he's just met them. You'd expect these fully-voiced conversations to offer an abundance of comic opportunities but actual jokes often take a backseat to profanity masquerading as a punchline.\nLet us remember that in the 90s, shock humor grew widespread as creative teams pushed back against conservative broadcast standards. Before The Simpsons became comedy royalty, its early seasons ruffled sitting politicians because it dared to have a cartoon boy sass his parents and teachers. When South Park introduced an entire town of foul-mouthed paper cutouts, it became front-page news.\nCompared to what kids were watching on television during this time, video games kept things remarkably clean-cut. Violence in the medium certainly caused an uproar, but swear words, sex scenes, and scatological humor were scarce on home consoles\u2014especially those made by Nintendo. The Kyoto-based company's American branch relaxed many of its overreaching content restrictions when it saw that the demand for Mortal Kombat exceeded expectations, but it retained an air of family-friendliness for many years afterwards, often to its detriment.\nDeveloper Rare\u2014a reliable partner to Nintendo\u2014achieved great success in the late 90s with titles aimed at older audiences. Killer Instinct, GoldenEye 007, and Perfect Dark all bore the Nintendo seal of quality even though they contained guns and gore. Yet Rare proved just as adept at delivering adventures starring adorable animals such as the Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Banjo-Kazooie, and the aforementioned Diddy Kong Racing.\nConker's Bad Fur Day began life as an example of the latter, originally announced as Conker's Quest in 1997 then retitled Twelve Tales: Conker 64 the following year. Within months of the rebranding, however, the press noticed Conker's absence from the upcoming release schedule. Behind the scenes at Rare, disagreements about the game's content led to delays. Project Leader and Game Designer Chris Seavor told Retro Gamer magazine in 2017 that the project's similarities to Banjo-Kazooie meant that only one of the two would make it to retail. \"It was a simple matter of change or die,\" Seavor said, \"so we changed.\"\nIn a 2012 interview with website Gamikia, Seavor further outlined Conker's need to stand apart from other 3D platformers. \"The trick with any new game when you\u2019re trying to pitch it,\" Seavor said, \"is: What does this game do that\u2019s different to its competitors? Humour, toilet or otherwise, was ours.\" Hence Rare transformed Conker's nut-collecting nature walk into a yarn about a hungover squirrel bumbling his way through a storybook world where everyone's salty, horny, or out for blood.\nTaste is a notoriously subjective matter and that goes double for comedy. I've spent many an afternoon enjoying an American movie in a Japanese theater and drawn stares because I'm laughing my ass off while my fellow patrons sit in perfect silence. Conversely, I've heard my family giggle and guffaw as Japanese comedians on television make funny faces and fall down. No one joke can possibly hit all audiences equally.\nHowever, I truly believe that Conker's Bad Fur Day fails as a comedy because it doubles down on trends that were already waning by its 2001 release. Nothing has a shorter shelf life than shock value. The raunchy teen movies I watched as a kid at sleepovers pale in comparison to the ejaculation-based gags enjoyed by mainstream moviegoers in the late 90s. This led Canadian prankster Tom Green to satirize that shift by starring, writing, and directing \"the stupidest, most disgusting movie you\u2019ve ever seen.\"\nConker's Bad Fur Day, on the other hand, plays out like any number of other video games except the cute critters on screen get drunk, bleed, and go to the bathroom a lot. They pepper their dialogue with \"shit\" and \"asshole\" but never an f-bomb; those are bleeped out. A few of them drop trow and show off their butts but none of them bare their breasts or expose their genitals\u2014though one caveman comes close. I won't judge you if you're snickering right now but I couldn't muster a smirk at any of these moments.\nCritics by and large disagreed with my take, lauding Conker's Bad Fur Day with high scores and higher praise in their reviews. For IGN, Matt Casamassina called it \"a devilishly funny 3D platformer with an intelligent edge\" in a 9.9 review (out of 10). GamePro's Star Dingo awarded Conker's Bad Fur Day a perfect 5.0 across the board, declaring that \"there\u2019s sublime satirical genius at work here.\" A 2009 retrospective by Thomas Bowskill declared Bad Fur Day a \"timeless classic\" and rated it 9/10 stars.\nIt's easy to take one look at Conker's Bad Fur Day 25 years after its debut and dismiss it as a product of its time, but I do admire Rare's gusto. They saw the market for cheery, happy collectathons as over-saturated and instead opted to cast a net in untested waters. Nintendo omitted any mention of the \"adult\" title in Nintendo Power in favor of an aggressive marketing campaign targeting teens and young adults. The gamble did not pay off commercially; few shoppers were still willing to spend $69.95 on Nintendo 64 software in 2001 with two PlayStations and one Dreamcast offering games for far less.\nI doubt any large publisher today would dare commit the necessary cash towards such a risky proposition, not without an established brand name attached. Of course, if Rare had pitched a game where Donkey Kong pissed on Zingers and threw feces at King K. Rool, Nintendo would've told them to jump in a lake.\nThe good news is that digital distribution and the proliferation of indies means anyone today can make a game as funny or outrageous as they like without worrying about toy stores refusing to stock the finished product. The bad news is it's harder than ever to make a game that stands out amongst a sea of daily releases. That, and if you fly too close to the sun your work might get banned on the whims of a corporation or an overseas payment processor.\nIn that light, I tip my hat to Rare and Conker for walking a tightrope and delivering a game that clearly amused thousands of people while still pleasing the suits in Kyoto, Japan and Redmond, Washington. After Microsoft acquired Rare for $375 million in 2002, the studio remade Bad Fur Day for the Xbox under the new title Conker: Live & Reloaded. The promise of better graphics, additional multiplayer modes, and support for online combat didn't move the needle in the sales department, however, and subsequent sequels never made it past the prototype phase.\nHonestly, the end of Conker's saga fills me with sadness. The jokes didn't land for me but I'd rather revisit Conker's Bad Fur Day or see a new squirrellish outing than play any of Rare's recent output under the thumb of Microsoft, that's for certain.\nWriter/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.", "guid": "152423849", "isoDate": "2026-03-08T12:00:17.000Z", "itunes": { "duration": "1076", "image": "https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/152423849/84639de227644f34b7d3568d5f7995ee/eyJkIjo3MiwiaCI6MzAwMCwic3RyaXBfYWxwaGEiOjEsInciOjMwMDAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-hash=UMDbCGLQqNzud8VKUXsvKSq9zBK2rBP631S9Or2Eufg%3D" }, "itunes_duration": "0:17:55" }