The Dorklyst: 6 Awesome Games That Were Completely Reinvented

Game design can be a long, difficult, drawn-out process, even for games that aren’t named Duke Nukem Forever. Games can change a lot during that time, sometimes so much that the final product looks nothing like what developers started work on. Here are 6 awesome games that went through big changes to get that way.

6) Conker’s Bad Fur Day-

By the late 90’s, the Nintendo/Rare love connection had churned out Banjo Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing, and Donkey Kong 64. And their next game, Twelve Tales: Conker 64, starring a diabetes-inducingly-sweet cartoon squirrel, wasn’t going to stray far from the brightly-colored path.

But all wasn’t well within Rare’s candy-coated empire: Conker’s producer, Chris Seavor, noticed some unpleasant rumblings… that the market for cutesy platformers was over-saturated, that fans weren’t excited about another one, that no one cared about a stupid squirrel who didn’t even have an awesome bird living in his backpack.

So he did what any responsible game designer would do: he killed Twelve Tales on the spot and brought it back to shambling unlife as a foul-mouthed parody of the very same cutesy platformers that Rare had made famous. Conker was now a reluctant, selfish hero tasked with fighting hangovers, Teddy Bear Nazis and singing piles of sh!t all in order to makes some quick cash. It was such a balls-out insane shift in direction that most people thought it was a joke until the game actually saw release. Bad Fur Day was fun and funny but sold poorly, mostly thanks to Nintendo’s reluctance to advertise the family-unfriendly title.