What if Goldeneye was made today? | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Christopher Dring

Head of Games B2B

Monday 9th May 2022

I visited Cambridge at the weekend to watch a panel on the making of Goldeneye, which was put on by the Centre for Computing History.

I went with GI's esteemed Editor-In-Chief James Batchelor. We are both Nintendo fans of the late 1990s, so naturally Goldeneye 007 ranks highly as one of the greatest games of all time.

In my admittedly very biased eyes, Goldeneye is one of the last big games of that era begging to be remastered (and people want a remaster, not a reimagining or a completely different game with the same name). It sold around eight million copies on the N64, and it's the console's most popular game outside of Japan. But Goldeneye's reach extended well beyond those eight million players. It was the one N64 game coveted by PlayStation fans. It was the Fortnite of the era, if Fortnite was a game that involved four friends huddled around a small boxy TV.

Of course, the game has been remastered but never officially released. It's stuck in a licensing quagmire due to the number of huge corporations involved (although maybe someone has managed to work it out).

Game preservation is a hot topic right now... but preserving the stories that surround them is just as important

Wishful thinking about remasters aside, James and I went to Cambridge to hear the anecdotes of three of the game's developers: Martin Hollis, David Doak and Brett Jones.

The Goldeneye story has been well told at this point, and the panel broadly covered it. Bond owners MGM approached Nintendo about making a Goldeneye game. Nintendo pushed the opportunity over to UK developer Rare. After a brief visit to the set, Rare decided not to make it, but was convinced to take it on by resident Bond obsessive