Conker's Pocket Tales is a 1999 action-adventure game developed and published by Rare for the Game Boy Color. It is the first game in the Conker series and follows the story of Conker the Squirrel as he retrieves his stolen birthday presents and rescues his girlfriend Berri, who has been kidnapped by the Evil Acorn. The cartridge is dual-format, allowing it to also run on the original Game Boy and the Super Game Boy with some gameplay differences.
Gameplay
Conker's Pocket Tales follows the story of Conker as he retrieves his birthday presents and rescues his girlfriend Berri after they were stolen and she was kidnapped by the Evil Acorn. with Conker exploring large environments in an attempt to find all his stolen presents. By collecting a certain number of presents in each area and defeating a boss, players unlock access to the next one. In addition to standard running and jumping, Conker can perform a mid-air ground-pounding attack that can hit buttons to solve puzzles. Conker also has the ability to dig up patches of soft dirt, emerging at another predetermined patch to reach inaccessible areas, and uses a slingshot to defeat enemies or hit distant switches. Puzzles are also solved by pushing blocks into grooves in the floor.
The game can be played on both Game Boy and Game Boy Color. However, the layout and some events in the game are different depending on the console it is played on. The game was released in 1999 for North America on June 8 and for Europe in July. Development began after the release of Donkey Kong Land III in 1997. Rare sought to make an action-adventure game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda, with a darker tone in the vein of gothic films. After seeing early versions of Conker's Bad Fur Day, they decided to remove the gothic theme and replace it with a fantasy theme, with Conker as its main character. The entire score was composed by Robin Beanland, with Eveline Fischer programming it into the Game Boy. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rated Conker's Pocket Tales as E for Everyone, at a time when the series had not yet been reoriented toward a more mature audience, a shift that would come with Conker's Bad Fur Day. Like with other Rare-developed games at the time, Nintendo handled physical distribution of the game.