Rare Appreciation Thread

[Kriven]

Conker is kind of interesting situation... I like the game well enough, but I'll always feel like it was the wrong direction for a character whose first appearance was racing side-by-side with Diddy Kong, and I'm always going to wonder what the game was originally going to be.

[Paladin]

Well, you can get a certain idea by watching the 30 minutes of footage from
the Conker beta on youtube.

[Kriven]

I do that from time to time... I always wish I could leap into a reality where that was completed.

[Paladin]

It looks like such a good game too...

I wish we could have gotten the full game.

[E-Man]

Conker's game probably would have been a good game whether or not it stuck to the original plans.

Rare's excuse for making it so gritty was that they wanted to try something different from the happy-go-lucky mascot platforming games that were extremely common back then. They fear that if they didn't do what they did to Conker, then it would be overshadowed by the other games out there (including some of their own, such as Banjo-Kazooie). I wouldn't say I blame them because if you look at the first Banjo game and then at Conker's Twelve Tales, you would see how much more polished and fresh of a game the former is compared to the latter.

[Paladin]

Yeah, it's good that they did something different, but I can't help but want the original Conker too, with its hyperactive and super happy atmosphere.

[Kriven]

I think there's (was?) room for Conker to have been the cuddly creature he was intended to be (and already had a game being) as well as a unique vulgar character to parody the furry animal platformer genre.

It's ironic that Conker got so drastically changed because of Banjo-Kazooie, which only became a platformer because the BK team copied what the Conker team was doing.

[Koopaul]

It's interesting how Rare would promote competition between the teams. It really pushed them to work on things, and it shaped the games we know today.