The Debauched, Corrupt World of Conker's Bad Fur Day.

"Marvellous." - Conker the Squirrel

Conker's Bad Fur Day was this game that was originally meant as another platform game that Rareware made before drastically being restructured into this very subversive and sophisticated mature audience oriented experience. Vulgar humour abounds, but then the collectathon elements present in the likes of Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo Kazooie/Tooie are heavily streamlined, where the puzzles seem direct and straightforward, and all you do really collect in this game is these wads of cash lying about - which you need to access certain parts of the game. Some puzzles are reduced down to these "context-sensitive buttons" where Conker is granted special abilities literally before the puzzle begins, so there's not really that much in the way of fumbling about or feeling like it's a game stretching itself out as much as possible. Everything here feels way more compact and linear, like it feels less like this giant world to explore, and much more like you're walking through this path that you can't escape.

There's a distinct sort of fanzine quality to this game, where it plays a great deal with these subversive elements. I suppose a good comparison to be made would be with Robert Crumb's Fritz the Cat series, which started off in the late 1950s as this comic strip about a cat named Fred, before eventually evolving into the way more adult oriented Fritz the Cat comics starting in 1965 - featuring tonnes in the way of debauchery and this counter-cultural appeal, and these aimless but very revealing adventures. There's parallels here with how each of these probe who these characters are, but a key difference is that I feel Fritz is just such an unlikable character, shameless, exhibiting all of these awful traits, whilst Conker is more of a sympathetic, somewhat tragic character who has a kind and compassionate side to him.

Which is kind of unexpected, considering that you might get this impression of Conker as this nasty, foul-mouthed little person who is just very rude and mean to people, certainly seemed like how this game was originally planned out. But then it also becomes clear that problems such as alcoholism and his greed seems to come way more from impulse than anything else, and I think the way it undercuts this image is very fascinating. Conker gets really drunk at the beginning, basically just because he impulsively decided to get really drunk, and this winds up spiralling into the main plot of the game. Later in the game, there's puzzles that you have to solve by getting Conker drunk again in a boiler room and a rave setting, which I suppose plays off of that old Simpsons adage that "alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." Conker can have moments where he's not a particularly likable character, but then there is an odd charisma that he exhibits.

The advertisements of this game certainly play up the whole debauched angle of this character, implying some sort of depraved element that's not entirely true, although the game does sort of tempt this angle every step of the way - showing Conker as this seemingly innocent character in this debauched world. Anyone who was a teenager or a child's first instinct with this game was to refer to it as "the game about a drunk squirrel who bounces off of a sunflower's breasts." (literally how this game was introduced to me) but then the content in this game isn't too graphic. Contemporary reviews and advertisements suggest it's rude and shocking and transgressive, with showing this squirrel engaging in very disgusting and crude activities - when also there's something about the cartoonish tone of the whole thing that undercuts the allegedly shocking material. There's profanity but where most of the stronger obscenities are bleeped, sexual material without being too explicit or really showing much nudity, and lots of bloody violence that's depicted in a very cartoonish, unrealistic way. Really, I think a full 20 years later, a lot of that central novelty surrounding that would have worn off.

This was sort of typical with how Conker was presented in advertisements, which is funny with the juxtaposition of the actual game.

Source: https://twitter.com/weirdgameads/status/1535227676973322241

A lot of the humour, in effect, comes from its characters and what it reveals about them - and I also guess I got caught up in the way it juxtaposes these very child-like visuals with this very adult subject matter, because it's just such a pervasive element of the game. One look of the game and you'd probably get this impression that it's a colourful kids game like Banjo Kazooie, some of the humour in this is actually very goofy and childish, but then there's also a lot to it that is very much dark adult humour, especially in terms of its themes regarding alienation and self-destruction. It seems to perfectly sum up those sort of feelings you get when you're a teenager or a young adult, and you just get a glimpse of what the real world is like - there's all of this exciting adult stuff, that also seems to sit side-by-side with some of the more depraved elements of the world that you can't quite make sense of.

The game is also so bright and colourful, and I like how this game has a very lived-in sort of atmosphere to a lot of the levels - there's a lot of variety to the environments that feel very textured, and I also particularly liked the soundtrack by Robin Beanland that has a very lively quality to it, also where some of the repurposed tracks from the original kid friendly version of the game suit the atmosphere very well. Conker himself was originally a kid friendly character appearing in games such as Diddy Kong Racing (1997) and Conker's Pocket Tales (1999) before this, and Conker's big game was originally meant to be the kid friendly Twelve Tales: Conker 64, where some of the features in the original Twelve Tales Conker game were repurposed into Bad Fur Day. I also actually played Pocket Tales as a small child before even hearing of this game, so I actually thought people were joking about this game's existence. A similar sort of thing seems to occur announced with an April 2000 Nintendo Power article stating that it was a mature title and elaborating on its elements, which a lot of people confused as being an April Fool's gag.

I think also the storytelling of this game, which relies heavily on vignettes, sort of benefits it. It does have a sort of aimless, disjointed quality to it, where suddenly you can go from this sunny meadow to mountains of shit, or underground raves, or gladiator arenas and so on, but then there are some very clear throughlines with this tyrannical panther king, this mob story, and also various recurring characters. It's not so much a game that's aiming towards this fully cohesive narrative, but much rather the emotional experience of Conker as he goes through all of these inexplicable encounters - which is framed as absurd, all the while sneaking all this underlying desperation underneath the surface. The then recent popularity of shows such as Beavis and Butthead and South Park were big inspirations to this game as well.

There's also a really insightful 24 part playthrough of the game from 2013-2014 (yet incomplete as of 2022, as it's only half-way through the game) with the developers where they talk about what choices they made with the game design, and also start getting mad at their own decade old design choices and having to resort to PewDiePie's playthrough of the game in order to figure out how to complete sections of the game, and also how aspects of foreshadowing were added in later to give the impression it's all planned out.  I think the gameplay in this is interesting because of how varied it is, although I feel it's very much something where it felt like all these off-the-cuff ideas being splattered down. It is also evident through a lot of the movie parodies ranging from stuff like The Wizard of Oz all the way to The Matrix, which are pretty amusing, but also give this game a sort of early 2000s zeitgeist quality to it.

I suppose what's most evident about this game beyond its toilet humour is how wickedly satirical this game is, and I think the story is a lot smarter than people give it credit for. Sure it has a lot of toilet humour and immature gags, but then the entirety of the game culminates with some sort of mosaic quality - and it is very much reflecting a painful mindset of being torn between childhood stuff and the adult world. The game also starts exactly where the game ends, so it's all just about showing these string of circumstances that cause this situation where Conker is king and is not too happy about it. Storytelling in this feels miraculous, again, I think it works much more underlyingly because of the feelings it tackles. Conker's Bad Fur Day seems like it shouldn't work but it does.