It was done without the knowledge or permissions of the management at Rare and Nintendo, he laughed, noting that if the team had not put it together on the sly before showing it to management, there’s no way it would have been allowed — the game was already late as it was.

Q: Originally, Conker began development as a family game called Conker’s Quest/Twelve Tales, and then changed into a violent platform game with raunchy humor.  Was Nintendo supportive of Rare’s decision to make such a dramatic change to the game?  Or did they distance themselves from the project?

Donnchadh Murphy: Back in those days Rare was the golden child, so when they announced that we were changing direction there was no objections, none that I knew about anyway. I’m so glad it did change, because “Twelve Tales”, to put it politely, was not a good game.  Chris Seavor took the reins in BFD and took it a direction nobody expected.

Smash Bros. led to similar misunderstandings when it first came out. Some people, including within the company, commented that they couldn’t imagine a worse game. The project was really saved by the fact that people “got” how to play it after it was released. If we had just listened to the complaints and instituted health gauges or command-based special moves, I don’t think we would have invented a new style of play that way. The controls here really aren’t that difficult, either, so I’m hoping that people will be able to get used to them.

The American rights were to go to Atari originally, but they turned them down, saying [Pac-Man] was too easy.