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Could you imagine a Nintendo title being advertised like this today? (Conker's Bad Fur Day, N64)
(lemmy.world)
This was printed in Playboy magazine in April 2001.
It's hard to explain to people who weren't around back then how loose the "rules" were for making games. Conker's Bad Fur Day was definitely trying to market itself as edgy, but aside from some faith-based groups who would be upset, nobody really cared.
Yeah. One reason being that this wasn't a Nintendo game. It was a Rare/THQ game. Nintendo didn't publish this.
This even being on a Nintendo system--subject to Nintendo's review--was a major change. Nintendo of America was as puritanical as it came up through the 16-bit era. Something like this releasing on a Nintendo system was unconscionable as late as 1995.
Nintendo famously changed their mind when Mortal Kombat 1 sold better on Genesis/Mega Drive than Super Nintendo.
Rare was basically a second party developer back in those days. They were given access to internal tools from Nintendo, a direct hotline for help, hell they even developed Nintendo IPs, which was unheard of for a western developer and is still rare even today
Yes, very Rare of them.
Doesn't change the fact that Nintendo only owned a minority share and that this specific game was not published by Nintendo. They had access to the development tools already, so it was no special treatment for Conker.