The Making of Conker: Live & Reloaded – Celebrating 15 Years with Xbox Feature

Perhaps the first release that most captured what Microsoft’s acquisition of Rare could be was Conker: Live & Reloaded. After all, it took a classic Rare title (N64 fan favourite Conker’s Bad Fur Day) and furnished it with features pivotal to Microsoft’s broader move on the console space.
Namely, Live & Reloaded featured a new multiplayer, hooking it into the Xbox Live Service.
“When we finished the N64 version, we were looking at doing Conker 2,” offers Rare veteran and lead gameplay engineer Chris Marlow. “We had some ideas and designs – but we were burnt out. It had been five years working on the first one. We were like: ‘If I see another squirrel…’ So we decided to go off and do other work.’
And so it was that Conker sat unattended to – and quite possibly drowning his sorrows – while the team toiled on other titles.
“At the time live-only games were popular, stuff like Quake Tournament,” Marlow continues. “Chris was keen to try that, because everyone loved the multiplayer on Conker. So in my spare time, between all the other work I was doing, I ported the N64 version onto Xbox. We went to Chris and Tim Stamper and said we’d like to do an online multiplayer-only version of Conker.”
The Stampers felt that releasing a game without a single-player campaign simply wasn’t workable. The team knew building a new Conker from the ground up wasn’t realistic. So the idea was floated that they could port the original Bad Fur Day, with new visuals and a new live multiplayer mode.
Despite being a port, a lot of work went into Live & Reloaded. The team was actually bigger than the original Conker team. The animations were redone, the visuals overhauled and the music re-recorded. It may have once been been an N64 game, but it was now pushing the boundaries of what the Xbox could do.
“By the time we were done with Live & Reloaded, the visuals were as good as, if not better than, Xbox 360 launch titles,” Marlow says. “We pushed the hardware do far that when we took the leap across, you couldn’t tell the difference. We were proud of that.”
In fact, the effort to rework the art and animations was tremendous, recalls the game’s lead animator Louise O’Connor.
“We had whatever the equivalent of Skype was with Phil Spencer on the big screen, and we were pitching him Live & Reloaded,” O’Connor says of a pivitol meeting. “We showed him what we wanted to do with the multiplayer, which was a big thing as it was really suitable for the Xbox audience. But also visually, he always said how pretty it looked. We were good at pushing graphics, even on the N64 version, and we did it again on Live & Reloaded.
“A lot of people think we just ported it. We redid so much. I redid every animation I had done in the original version and more. We created more animations for the second game. Then we had the whole Live aspect, which was totally new for us. We revamped everything. All new textures, new character models, all-new animations. We had to re-do all cutscenes. It was a huge amount of work.”
Meanwhile, composer Robin Beanland devoted a similar effort to the project.
“It was a case of going back over all of those tunes and reworking them with live instrumentation and better quality samples, which was quite a challenge,” he says. “Trying to play some of those original pieces for real was impossible. So we had to rework them. We were coming from [the N64’s] constraints, to having all of this memory and stuff to play around with. We were learning about everything almost all over again.
“With cartridges, memory was a big issue. We had to cram all this stuff in. The moment we were on optical media, we could do what we wanted.”
Although not a big sales hit, Live & Reloaded delighted fans, and proved popular on Xbox Live.
“It was unfortunate, because [the original] came out at the end of the N64’s lifecycle, and then Live & Reloaded came out at the end of Xbox’s life,” Marlow says. “We did ok, but it was never a massive hit – which was nice, in a way. Conker is quite cult-like.”