Film licences had a bad name when Rare’s Bond game went into production. Karl Hilton, who joined the company in October 1994, remembered his first thought when Martin Hollis asked him onto the project: “Oh God, a film licence. The previous ones had been 2D Robocop or Batman games and they were generally awful.” GoldenEye 007 arrived nearly two years after the 1995 film, made by a team that had almost never made a game before, on a console that did not exist for the first part of its development. Edge gave it nine out of ten and said that plugging in the cartridge “immediately dispels any fear that the title will follow in the steps of previous film adaptations”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Rare, for Nintendo, who published it.
- Released: August 1997 in Japan and North America and November 1997 in Britain, for the Nintendo 64, on a 96-megabit cartridge.
- Director: Martin Hollis.
- Team: nine people, for eight of whom it was a first game, among them David Doak, Steve Ellis, Karl Hilton, Graeme Norgate and Duncan Botwood.
- Music: mainly Graeme Norgate and Grant Kirkhope; it was the first game Kirkhope composed for.
- Sales: 8 million copies worldwide, according to Retro Gamer in 2007.
Off the rails
The game did not start as a first-person shooter. Retro Gamer’s account of the development says the first idea was a 2D side-scrolling platform game for the Super Nintendo, the kind Rare was known for after Donkey Kong Country. Hollis insisted on 3D and on Nintendo’s coming console, and named his model: Sega’s light-gun arcade game Virtua Cop. Hilton’s first job was to model the gas plant, with a fixed route through it “like in Virtua Cop”. Then, Hilton said, “we decided to take it off the rails”, and the player was free to walk anywhere.
For the first year and a half the team had no Nintendo 64. It worked on Silicon Graphics Onyx workstations, guessing at the specification of the new console, and tested with a modified Sega Saturn controller. When the finished hardware arrived, Steve Ellis said, “the processor ended up being three quarters of what they had told us. We had to cut the textures down by half.” Much of the game was drawn in greyscale, Hilton explained, because colour textures cost more processing: “If I needed a bit of colour, I’d add it in the vertex.”
The team visited the film set at Leavesden Studios about half a dozen times and photographed walls for textures. Nintendo’s own games shaped the design. Doak said that when Super Mario 64 arrived, “it was clearly a step forward”, and that shooting alone was not enough: “We started putting in objectives, like meeting people in a level.” Hollis later credited The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past as well: “The game became much more open as a result of us studiously learning what Nintendo was.”
What the player could do
GoldenEye’s 18 missions follow the film, with more added. Each has a list of objectives, and, Edge reported, “the exact number depending on the difficulty setting”, so the same level became a longer mission on a harder setting. Bond could hold a gun in each hand, and the sniper rifle could zoom in on a guard hundreds of metres away. Edge singled out both as features “which would not be expected from a movie licence”.
The guards were the bigger change. Each part of the body carried its own weight in the damage calculation: a shot in a limb or the torso took a guard part of the way to death, and a shot in the head killed outright. They reacted to where they were hit, as Edge noticed, some rolling while still firing, others crouching or running at the player. Doak explained how they heard the player. Every shot sent an alert to the guards within a radius, and repeated firing widened it, so “the less you shot, the quieter you were, the less enemies came after you”. Security cameras could raise the alarm. Players who went quietly got through more easily, and Retro Gamer wrote that the team had “almost inadvertently” made stealth part of the game.
The details were made in-house. Rare’s staff had their faces scanned onto the enemies, and in the Facility mission the double agent the player has to find is a scientist called Dr Doak. The frightened scientists’ knocking knees in the motion capture belonged to Duncan Botwood, “one of the team”, Hilton said. The weapons could not carry real brand names, so the unreliable Russian submachine gun became the Klobb, named after Nintendo’s Ken Lobb.
Nintendo was uneasy about the violence. Hollis said the team answered it with the closing credits, which list the characters like a film cast: “It underlined that this was artifice. The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”
Four players, one screen
The multiplayer mode was a late addition. “We didn’t know whether multiplayer was technically possible,” Ellis said. “It was an experiment that didn’t begin until May… and the game came out in August!” He adapted the code written for one player to work for several; Hilton built levels for it under strict polygon limits. According to Graeme Norgate, the Stampers had told the team there would be no multiplayer, and Edge’s 2013 retrospective called it “cobbled together six weeks before deadline day”, by Rare’s own telling.
At first players could be any of the Bonds. Shortly before release, Doak recalled, a visitor from EON, the company that owned the Bond licence, saw Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton in the game, and they had to go. On the day they had to be taken out, the team played a three-hour deathmatch with them, first to a hundred kills.
What remained was, in Edge’s 1997 description, a “hugely addictive” option with five scenarios, and a choice of characters that included Bond villains from other films, such as Jaws and Oddjob. The modes took their names from the films: in You Only Live Twice each player had two lives, in Licence to Kill a single shot killed, and in The Man with the Golden Gun one weapon did so. Groups of players set their own rules. Edge remembered in 2013 that many “banned the diminutive Oddjob”, who was harder to hit than the full-size characters.
Reception
Edge’s review, in August 1997, found in the game “a genuine sense of ‘being there’ which is rarely experienced in a videogame”, from bullet holes in the walls to hats shot off guards’ heads. N64 Magazine reviewed it over six pages in October and concluded: “Sheer, unadulterated Bond brilliance. You cannot buy better.” Not everyone at Rare had expected it to do well. “I was concerned it wouldn’t be able to compete with Turok,” Hilton admitted: “That looked better and had a better frame rate… and dinosaurs!” Retro Gamer put its sales at 8 million copies worldwide.
After GoldenEye
Hollis led the team into Perfect Dark (2000), but left Rare in 1998 and later founded his own company, Zoonami. Other members went further together. Edge reported in 2000 that five of the GoldenEye team had left Rare to found Free Radical Design, whose first game was TimeSplitters for the PlayStation 2. By 2001 Doak was its head of design, Ellis head of software, Hilton head of art and Norgate responsible for music and sound. “Free Radical Design was set up on the back of GoldenEye,” Ellis told Retro Gamer. “It opened doors for us.”
Sources
- Edge issue 48, August 1997, pp. 66–68: review, nine out of ten; 18 missions, objectives by difficulty, dual weapons, the sniper rifle, hit reactions and the multiplayer scenarios.
- N64 Magazine issue 7, October 1997, pp. 50–55: review; the double agent Dr Doak.
- Edge issue 80, January 2000: Martin Hollis, director of GoldenEye.
- Edge issue 84, May 2000: Free Radical Design and TimeSplitters, “brought to you by five of the GoldenEye team”.
- Edge issue 102, October 2001, pp. 38–39: Free Radical Design’s David Doak, Steve Ellis, Karl Hilton and Graeme Norgate and their roles.
- Retro Gamer issue 38, 2007, pp. 28–33, Paul Drury, “The Making of: GoldenEye”: Doak, Ellis, Hilton and Norgate on the project’s origins, the hardware, textures, Leavesden, the objectives, hit locations and alerts, the faces and motion capture, the multiplayer mode and the Bonds removed from it, sales, and Hollis’s departure.
- Retro Gamer issue 110, 2013, p. 53: Grant Kirkhope’s first composed title, GoldenEye 64.
- Edge issue 258, October 2013, pp. 76–77: retrospective on the multiplayer, its modes, Oddjob, and its late creation.
- Wireframe issue 54, August 2021, pp. 30–31, “The ingredients of a great James Bond game”: the Klobb and Ken Lobb; Hollis on Nintendo’s influence and the closing credits.
- Wikipedia, “GoldenEye 007 (1997 video game)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates of 23 August 1997 (Japan), 25 August 1997 (North America) and 7 November 1997 (United Kingdom); music mainly by Graeme Norgate and Grant Kirkhope. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldenEye_007_(1997_video_game)