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Conker's Bad Fur Day was originally going to be Conker's Quest in 1998, a cutesy platforming adventure game staring a young squirrel. It was quickly criticized for being too cute and too similar to Banjo-Kazooie. Rare then did a complete overhaul on the project and released the M-Rated Conker's Bad Fur Day in 2001.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEuFNl4s9yI

Beta footage of the original game.

http://uk.ign64.ign.com/articles/073/073948p1.html

Old IGN article announcing the return of the game after it was quietly cancelled.

This is fairly well-known. The GBC games and Conker's appearance in Diddy Kong Racing both predated the change to Bad Fur Day.

I'm actually really surprised that a ROM of the early Conker 64 alpha/beta was never leaked onto the internet in some form. It looked like a relatively complete piece of playable software, so you'd think it existed on a test cart at some point. It's probably on some backup hardware collecting dust in Rare's office, behind the shackles of Microsoft...

The final name for the product would have been Twelve Tales: Conker 64

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conker%27s_..._marketing