Who remember’s Conker’s? Well if you grew up in the 90’s or before I imagine you would have had a passing glance or even a passing love affair with the gutter mouthed squirrel. Many years ago the original Conker’s was released onto the Nintendo 64, originally seeing as much recognition as Jet Force Gemini but since has gained quite a cult following, this in turn is mainly due to Conker’s not having been in the limelight for many years now, however, this may not be the case much longer. Apparently Microsoft wants to bring the character back in a reboot to a new audience, however they seem to be having some trouble finding someone who they can turn to work on the game. Apparently Microsoft has approached Insomniac games about working on the Conkers reboot, knowing Insomniac’s history in games with Ratchet and Clank, Resistance and even the recent Xbox One exclusive Sunset Overdrive this seems like a brilliant combination that would work well to reestablish the character.
However those who thought this would work like myself will be saddened as Insomniac has said no to Microsoft on this offer.
Apparently there is a reason we haven’t seen much about the character and a new game for a many years as a verified Reddit user named Certain_Ability suggests it all came down to popularity.
“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.” – Certain_Ability
“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, Insomniac 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.” – Certain_Ability
At the present time of writing it is impossible to say how much truth there is to this, however Reddit moderators have been provided with proof of this users credentials and are saying this is true.
For now lets just be satisfied with the thought that we could be seeing a return of the Conker’s franchise as well as several other classic franchises within the coming years.
Hopefully we will get confirmation on this soon and be able to confirm this as more then a rumor because we really need it.
