There’s been a little bit of a buzz recently, after Ken Lobb announced that there were plans to revive some older Rare IPs, and a bunch of old Rare guys have come together to do a Banjo successor. I wanted to take this opportunity to share some stuff from when I was working at Microsoft, and I can say that there has been a lot of internal conflict about these old Rare IPs as of late.
I was with MS for several years, and have been tied to a lot of projects, like Sunset Overdrive and was doing a little bit of work for the Master Chief Collection. I wasn’t working on any games per se, but I was in a position where I was able to see a lot of these games and other potential projects in development. From my position, I was able to learn a lot about the relationship between MS and these old Rare IPs, and the one that had the most ‘buzz’ around the office prior to my departure: Conker.
So the Conker IP has been pretty much been stagnant since the Xbox version, and it’s kind of fallen by the wayside. With other IPs, management seems pretty chill in discussing new ideas, but for the longest time Conker was never really on the table for new projects. A lot of people around the office thought that MS didn’t have much faith in the Conker IP. From what I heard, a lot of people thought the style felt really dated, and that the crude humor of it felt too 90’s for modern audiences. That was just rumors and gossip from the staff, some of which have been with the company since the first Xbox came out, so I trusted what they said.
That mostly changed around spring of 2014. All of a sudden, I became flooded with emails and design docs for a new Conker game. Basically, MS wanted to reboot Conker, and was shopping around for developers to make the new game. MS wasn’t comfortable developing it, and Rare DEFINITELY wasn’t making it.
For a while, it really looked like Insomniac would take on the Conker reboot, they were already doing third-party stuff for MS, and they had made a hit platformer series in the past.
However, Insomiac turned MS down too. Apparently MS wanted Conker to hit store shelves by the end of 2015, and Insomiac refused because of the short dev cycle. MS wanted Conker out the door really quickly, because they wanted to reintroduce audiences to a bunch of older IPs that MS were planning on rebooting for 2016-17, like Perfect Dark and Banjo.
The Conker project has been pretty much canned. No one wants to make it, because MS wants to rush it out. I’m not sure if those other reboots will continue as planned, or if they wanna wait for someone to tackle Conker, like I said, I no longer work for MS and have been out of the loop for a little while, but as is, don’t hold your breath for a new Conker game.
Here is an email chain between me and another MS employee, just to show you some of the thoughts of the people at MS after Conker was put on ice. It left a sour taste in people’s mouths, as you can tell.
