This was printed in Playboy magazine in April 2001.
It’s hard to explain to people who weren’t around back then how loose the “rules” were for making games. Conker’s Bad Fur Day was definitely trying to market itself as edgy, but aside from some faith-based groups who would be upset, nobody really cared.
Rare was basically a second party developer back in those days. They were given access to internal tools from Nintendo, a direct hotline for help, hell they even developed Nintendo IPs, which was unheard of for a western developer and is still rare even today
Yes, very Rare of them.
Doesn’t change the fact that Nintendo only owned a minority share and that this specific game was not published by Nintendo. They had access to the development tools already, so it was no special treatment for Conker.