Veteran video game developer Rare was working on an unreleased follow-up to its cult favorite 3D platformer Conker’s Bad Fur Day in the mid-2000s, designers close to the project revealed in a documentary video published this week.
Conker: Gettin’ Medieval was a multiplayer shooter that reunited the Bad Fur Day cast for a series of online team-based battles. The project was never completed, leaving only scant gameplay footage and concept art as proof of its existence.
Gettin’ Medieval entered the planning phase of development in the months after the launch of Conker: Live & Reloaded for the original Xbox. The team at Rare focused on expanding Live & Reloaded‘s online multiplayer component for Gettin’ Medieval, shifting the series away from its single-player roots.
“My interest was in multiplayer,” designer Chris Seavor said. “That’s where I saw the best scope, as a designer, to do something new and interesting. I wanted to take that idea and do a game that was completely online.”
Conker’s Bad Fur Day, released for the Nintendo 64 in 2001, is a 3D platformer that satirizes the colorful environments and chirpy characters common to the genre. Built on the foundation of the cancelled Twelve Tales, Bad Fur Day is a Mature-rated game that features frequent profanity, extreme violence, and a drunken squirrel protagonist prone to explosive mood swings.
Unlike its predecessor, Gettin’ Medieval would have featured limited options in terms of single-player content, instead focusing on a cooperative team-based experience. Gettin’ Medieval recast series characters as fictional figures from history who each wielded themed weaponry.
While Conker’s Bad Fur Day was heavily censored when it was ported to the original Xbox, a fully uncensored version was recently featured in the 30-game retro compilation Rare Replay for the Xbox One. Conker himself resurfaced in Microsoft’s game-building toolkit Project Spark in a series of episodic releases throughout the last year.
