Though clearly a fan of GoldenEye 007 herself, Alyse Knorr has a surprisingly functional depiction of the Bond Team at Rare in the late nineties. Her Boss Fight book, centered as it is around the working environment of the developers, provides a compelling argument that GoldenEye 007 may well have been the last major game completely built from scratch, a function of the Nintendo 64 classic predating Unity and modern animation rigging. It’s also one of many reasons why GoldenEye 007, the game, came out a full two years after the movie was released theatrically 1995, which you’d certainly think would put a damper on the game’s relevance but that’s obviously not the case.
The story of GoldenEye 007 is, fittingly, a very British one. Martin Hollis is the man responsible for getting the game greenlit. This is a non-intuitive story in a lot of ways. Nintendo wanted a GoldenEye game, but the Stamper brothers at Rare weren’t all that interested. Martin Hollis, a rookie in the game development industry without enough sense to realize that licensed video games had a bad reputation, heard about the offer, and somehow convinced the Stamper brothers that he could put a team together to make a genuinely great game. Everyone on the Bond Team was a rookie, the sort of people who built video games in their garage and most of them just really loved James Bond as a concept.
The book’s description of the Bond team often reminded me of this quote from an old game review I read back in the day: “Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64 remains the best James Bond game ever made because while you play it, you feel like James Bond.” While we tend to think of licensed games as bad, the reason why they’re bad is because they almost always operate under fairly onerous restrictions in regard to characterization and time crunch. It’s easy to see, from Knorr’s descriptions of the Bond Team, how these turned into advantages. Rookie programmers with no real development experience nonetheless have a pretty good idea what James Bond is.
Likewise, since GoldenEye 007 was being developed for the Nintendo 64, hardware that the Bond Team didn’t get to see until long into development, hardware which itself was delayed to 1996, there were ample excuses for the Bond Team to take their time and get it right. Although I should note that “take their time” might not be the best phrasing here, given that they were working punishing eighty hour weeks. Likewise, it’s not like Nintendo was insensitive to the delays. There was an entire extended period where the game was straight up canceled and the Stamper brothers avoided telling the Bond Team because they were confident that they could talk Nintendo out of this fairly extreme step, given time.
Factors like this led to the Bond Team having remarkably good morale, to the point they even managed to shove the game’s legendary multiplayer mode in last minute. GoldenEye 007 is a game of unusual influences, with the likes of Super Mario 64 and Super Bomberman having a more direct thoroughline than Doom. What made GoldenEye 007 such a big deal was that no one had any concept of even attempting a four-player split screen shooter. Never minding the technical challenges, why would anyone want to play a game that way when the standard of games like Quake was having a nice monitor all to yourself while shooting other players over a LAN connection?
Part of the recursive charm of Xibalba 64 to me was how it envisions the Doomclone aesthetic existing alongside the deathmatch polish of Goldeneye 007. It’s a fun contrast because Doomclones as a genre were largely killed off by Goldeneye 007. Although ironically enough, despite its influence, the GoldenEye 007 style itself didn’t last too long, being supplanted by Halo in the short term and Xbox Live in the long-term getting rid of the split-screen entirely. Part of the problem was the Bond license itself, which paradoxically became so valuable thanks to GoldenEye 007 that none of those original programmers could feasibly work on it again.
Not that they really wanted to. As rookies, they needed the guiding principle of James Bond, but as experienced programmers responsible for the biggest gaming hit of the late nineties, having to draw within the lines of that mythos was just too restricting. In all these regards, GoldenEye 007 is an artifact of its era, and its story in this Boss Fight book, one of those legends that’s unlikely to recur.
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