The making of GoldenEye 007, a wildly ambitious classic
Beloved N64 FPS Goldeneye 007 is out today on Game Pass, and a wonderful excuse to revisit this all time classic postmortem on the game from GDC 2012 Europe. In the talk, creative director Martin Hollis walks through his history making games (and an amazing James Bond video he made with his brothers as a kid), his creative inspirations for the game, and about two dozen incredible anecdotes about how various aspects of the game came together. For fans of the game, whether you are revisiting on Xbox or not, it’s a treasure trove of GoldenEye, Rare, Nintendo and general 90s development lore.
One of the wildest parts, to me, is just how little the team knew about the N64 hardware (and controller) at the start of the project. Hollis mentions a “rumor” that the new system would have an analog stick on its controller, and muses early on about the possibility of a 007 light gun game (in the vein of 90s arcade staple Virtua Cop), which is listed in some of the early notes he shared in the presentation.
Hollis speaks to a lot of the foundational player experience goals and tone: at the very beginning, he asked how much humor and violence should come to play in the game. He makes a point about aiming for a very “Hollywood” tone of violence: exaggerated but relatively “clean,” without much gore. He references a pretty amusing (to me, at least) rundown, where he says “Street Fighter is less violent than Virtua Cop, which is less violent than Doom, which is less violent than Pulp Fiction.”
There’s also something sort of wonderful about how much the early design documents reference Virtua Cop but with much more (more characters, more scenarios, etc.). GoldenEye is, I think, much more fondly and widely remembered than the arcade shooter,
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