Conker's Bad Fur Day Lore is Deeper Than You Think
Newly found evidence suggest the video game is about MGTOW
Conker’s Bad Fur Day was released over twenty years ago! As originally developed as Twelve Tales: Conker 64, the developer Rare already had Banjo-Kazooie and Diddy Kong Racing as family-friendly options. But they also had Killer Instinct Gold and Perfect Dark as their adult products. Conker, who already made his debut on the Gameboy Color in Conker Pocket Tales, had some legacy issues. As if Rare wanted to take every single character found in Diddy Kong Racing and give them a video game to promote their brand. Should Conker even exist? With the backlash that Rare was too invested in children’s video games, Conker’s “Bad Fur Day” was conceived as a statement between the G-rated and the R-rated. Why not make a game for the transitioning “college male” audience?
While Conker’s Bad Fur Day did not surpass overall expectations in sales, the game gathered a cult following based on its bold humor, originality, game design, and highly technical innovation. It was a platformer that did not follow a generic “collect-a-thon” gauntlet, but instead transformed the medium into a non-linear and deeply engaging story, both dark and light when it wanted to be.
The game is noted for having an unresolved cliffhanger, as Conker walks out of The Cock and Plucker pub drunk, aimlessly tripping into the darkness. This was set up so Rare could work on the next game. However, Rare was bought but Microsoft, and they had to dump the production. Instead, Rare released a remake titled Conker: Live & Reloaded in the summer of 2005, in hopes they could continue and boost support for the sequel. Still, nothing came about, even to this day. Rare did release the small experiment, Conker's Big Reunion in 2015, but it did not live up to the original plot of the story, nor achieve any satisfaction within the fanbase.
I assume the reader has played Conker’s Bad Fur Day or knows about it. If you haven’t played it or watched a long play of it, please do so now.
…Recently, Chris Seavor, the project developer and head of the Conker franchise, who also calls himself on Twitter “Conkerhimself,” released leaks of the bible for the canceled Conker sequel. Titled, “Conker’s Other Bad Day,” the sequel would have been released for the GameCube right around the time of 2002’s Star Fox Adventures. The Bible informs us that the plot for Conker is not quite what we think it’s about. If you know the entire story of what happened in Bad Fur Day, these leaked documents make us reconsider what the entire series is about.
According to a 2008 Rare fansite,
"Conker's Other Bad Fur Day was supposed to follow Conker’s quest for his girlfriend Berri after her death in Bad Fur Day, but this time as the king of all his land. Such a premise would have been easy to come up with, since the Easter egg sequence after the ending credits of Bad Fur Day showed Conker getting wasted once again and walking into the darkness, presumably during the early morning of what was about to become his hundredth hung-over day.
It could have been that. But people wanted to know it for sure. Chris Seavor answered that not only did they start working on a sequel with that title, but they also had a full storyline ready to be depicted on the screen and many new movie references in mind: “We started on a direct sequel which was going to be called ‘Conker’s Other Bad Day‘ which dealt with Conker’s somewhat unsuccessful tenure as King. He spends all the treasury money on beer, parties and hookers. Thrown into prison, Conker is faced with the prospect of execution and the game starts with his escape, ball, and chain attached, from the Castles highest tower.”[1]
According to Chris Seavor revealed in an interview in September 2012,
"It had some graphics and concepts done for sure but didn’t get much further than that. As for what happened to Conker in OBD, well he became Emperor of the Known Universe, got a new girlfriend, and lost an old one (again). There was also a massive space poo: The Cthulpoo, the main baddie. Lots of other stuff happened, with some new characters appearing and old favorites returned. We got to find out about Gregg’s childhood and why he hated cats, there were tons and tons of parodies of the more contemporary movies and an evil doppelganger version of Conker that you got to play for a while. And (Birdy) died. That kinda stuff… As with the original, it ended on a bittersweet note."[2]
As of 2019, some pages for the Other Bad Day have been leaked by Seavor himself! We get a better picture of what the entire universe is about, and what Conker does after he is king.
We not only get pictures of the first level of Conker’s ball & chain escape but also what the plot entails.
Here is what amazed me about the story. The main villain, Professor Von Kriplespac, or “the Weasel Professor,” is “nothing but a robot invented by [Berri] after she survived.” This means that the time frame for the first game entirely misleads the player. This, in turn, could be translated that all dialogue spoken by Professor Von Kriplespac is that of Berri’s concerns. A textual analysis & rereading of the previous dialogue in the first game suggests that the vague name “Weasel Professor” is nothing more than the thoughts of Conker's angry girlfriend who is mad at him for going out to the bar and ignoring her. Thus the entire plot of Conker is about a man’s relationship struggle with his girlfriend.
It t also revealed that Conker finds a new girlfriend, (and eventually turns into his wife) and that Berri is the main antagonist of the series.
Even more so, that the evil Panther King, who tries to get revenge on Conker, also becomes a good guy against Berri.
I was thinking about replaying Conker’s Bad Fur Day again with the intention of understanding that Professor Von Kriplespac is a red herring. Also, Berri is now a cyborg and is the same type that better explains the origins of how The Haybot and The Experiment were created.
There are many contradictions and plot loopholes in the Conker universe. For example, Professor Von Kriplespac in the manual was once referred to as the peaceful “Weasel King” before he got his legs torn off by the Panther King. However, in Conker: Live & Reloaded, Professor Von Kriplespac gets his legs blown off during combat as the “Tediz Battle Master.” It’s hard to confirm which canon of the story is correct, as the divide is between the “Milk Wars” vs. the “Old War” canon. That is the genius of the story in Conker, as most of the events are never explained and are up to the player’s speculation, like a vague “creepypasta” or “lost media” fever dream of sorts. Rare also planned for a Conker sequel called “Conker: Gettin Medieval,” as a multiplayer game within the Conker universe, but without Conker himself, and Gregg the Grim Reaper as the protagonist. This would explain much of the lore in better detail, especially from a grimdark perspective.
Considering what’s in the bible for the Other Bad Day, Berri controls the Weasel Professor. Whether his name is “Professor Von Kriplespac” could also be a red herring. No mention of his name is in the original Nintendo 64 manual. As it states on page 7 describing the Weasel King, “It is unknown whether or not any of this happened, but it makes for a good story to scare naughty little squirrels.”
The question should be if Professor Von Kriplespac is a robot controlled by Berri before she drifts off into space. The Professor has a personality of his own, but did he know he was being ordered around by Berri this entire time? Something to consider.
If so, this is a story about a man and his annoyance with trying to tell his girlfriend he just wants to get a pint with his pals at his pub, and all of this is some exaggerated, avant-garde story of sorts made up around design and experimentation than anything.
Nonetheless, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and the potential sequel of Conker’s Other Bad Day is Filmationcore at its best. Seeing some of these bible leaks makes me reconsider the entire plot of Conker and its meaning. It’s not just a bunch of South Park potty jokes over and over again, but deeply surreal and artistic plot twists and hidden meaning behind the settings and characters. If Rare has accomplished anything with the Conker series, it’s that they accidentally created a game invested into experimental and deep lore than anything that has been produced before. I hope I get to see a proper Conker sequel in my lifetime that isn’t crass and lowbrow. Hopefully, the next Conker game will be on the epic scale of Gene Wolfe’s Book of The New Sun.
-pe
2-26-2023