Martin Hollis | Code Like It's 198x

Martin Hollis got the job of making a James Bond game by asking for it. A few people from Rare had come back from a press party for the film GoldenEye “a little bit down on the idea of doing a game”, he told Retro Gamer, so he went to Tim Stamper, one of the brothers who founded the company, with a ten-page design document covering the story, the levels and the weapons, “but without actually mentioning the genre. After some convincing, I got the nod.” He was in his early twenties, had been at Rare for about a year, and his only game so far was the arcade Killer Instinct. The game his team delivered in 1997, GoldenEye 007, became one of the best-known games on the Nintendo 64.

Fast facts

Born: 1971.
Education: mathematics and computer science at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Rare: 1993 to 1998; second programmer on the arcade Killer Instinct, then director of GoldenEye 007 (1997) and of Perfect Dark for its first 14 months.
Nintendo: worked with Nintendo of America in Redmond on the design of the GameCube.
Zoonami: founded in Cambridge at the end of 1999 or in 2000; games include Zendoku, Go! Puzzle and Bonsai Barber.

From type-ins to Twycross

Hollis’s first computer was a ZX81, for a day. “It didn’t work, so we sent it back. Then the replacement didn’t work either.” His father, a teacher, bought a BBC Micro instead, and the 12-year-old played as many games as he could. He got his first game published the following year and was paid £40, which he worked out at about 30p an hour. More type-in listings followed in Popular Computing Weekly and BBC Micro User.

He thought that going into games as a teenager would be like “running off to join the circus”, so he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read mathematics and computer science. His first job was with a small start-up company in his home town of Frome, in Somerset, doing work for the Ministry of Defence. He soon grew bored, saw an advertisement for Rare, and the company took him on, “much to my surprise”. “I was one of the first graduates they recruited,” he said. “I just had to swear a bit and I fitted in fine.”

Killer Instinct

Rare made him second programmer on Killer Instinct, an arcade fighting game built on hardware meant to resemble Nintendo’s coming console, Project Reality, later the Nintendo 64. “We all knew why we were being asked to do Killer Instinct,” he said. “It was to promote this machine that didn’t exist yet.” He was the first person at Rare to have one of the boards carrying the new console’s chips in his Silicon Graphics workstation: “there were only 50 of them in the world. Rare got sent one and it landed on my desk.”

GoldenEye 007

Computer and Video Games named Hollis as producer when it previewed the game in February 1996, and the team said work had begun in January 1995. Hollis recruited people who were new to Rare and not tied to its existing style, and most of them had never made a game. Hollis knew from the start what it would not be: “I knew it would be a mistake to do too many things, like having a skiing section, a racing section… No, this was going to be a game about shooting.”

When Edge met the team at the end of 1997, Hollis, described as “game director/programmer”, was open about its influences: “We couldn’t pretend we didn’t play Doom a lot.” The finished hardware arrived late, and the team had worked for a long time on Silicon Graphics Onyx machines standing in for it. “It was just an enormous amount of trouble,” he said; getting the engine running took “probably about a year”. The game had once filled 380 megabits and was squeezed on to a 96-megabit cartridge by compression. The four-player mode came late. “It was probably about March or something when I decided that it would be a very good idea despite all the deadlines,” he said. People told him split-screen would be no fun, and he half believed them, but “if you’re sitting beside the other three people, you can shout and scream at them”. Steve Ellis wrote the multiplayer code.

The game came out more than eighteen months after the film. “There was pressure,” Hollis told Wireframe. “It wasn’t relentless. It was reasonable, studied pressure. We missed one Christmas, and Howard Lincoln wrote me a fax explaining how important it was to meet the interests of buyers and schedules. My attitude was it simply wasn’t ready.” He told Retro Gamer that after that fax from Howard Lincoln, the head of Nintendo of America, he raised his working hours to 120 a week. He later credited Nintendo’s own games with opening the design up: “The game became much more open as a result of us studiously learning what Nintendo was.” He also described the cast-list credits at the end as his team’s answer to Nintendo’s unease about the violence: “It underlined that this was artifice.” The GoldenEye 007 entry tells the full story of the game.

Perfect Dark and leaving Rare

Rare turned down a GoldenEye sequel. “Three years day-in day-out living with James Bond was enough for me,” Hollis said in 2005, and he wanted a female lead seen through the player’s eyes: “It would be as if ‘you’ were a woman.” He directed Perfect Dark for its first 14 months of a three-year project, then left Rare in 1998.

His own accounts of why have varied. In 2004 he told Edge that his contract was up and that “there wasn’t really room for me to move up”; he would have liked to stay, and he added that he had always been unhappy with the idea of selling the company, “one of my reasons for leaving, I guess”. In 2005 he told Retro Gamer: “I’m not positive why; I just followed my heart. Maybe I left because I felt I had run out of challenges in that environment.” In 2008 he told the same magazine that the plan had been to reuse the GoldenEye engine and finish in a year, that it became clear the project would take much longer, and that when he told Tim and Chris Stamper he wanted to leave at some point, “that just wasn’t acceptable to them. We had a falling out and to cut a convoluted story short, I left.” Several of his team followed him out of Rare over the next year, and some of them founded Free Radical Design.

Nintendo and the GameCube

After travelling round Asia, Hollis was hired by Nintendo Technology Development, a Nintendo of America group in Washington State that was in charge of developing the GameCube. His job, he told Edge, was “to help steer development of the platform”, bringing a game developer’s view to the hardware. “In the end I had to say that hardware wasn’t what I wanted to do, I wanted to make games.”

Zoonami

He came back to England and set up Zoonami in Cambridge. He dated it to the end of 1999; Edge and Retro Gamer gave 2000. He wanted to make original games and be ready to drop the ones that did not work: “I wanted to take risks, not do sequels and be prepared to shelve projects.” The studio sketched many concepts, kept about one in a hundred and built prototypes of those. In 2004 he showed Edge Funkydilla, a one-button music game running on a GameCube development kit, with seven people in the core team. He told the magazine he wanted it to sell ten million copies, and that developers who got by on games selling 100,000 or a million were “not a business I want to be in”.

Funkydilla never came out. By 2008 Zoonami had published four games, all original: Zendoku, which crossed sudoku with ninja duels on the Nintendo DS and PSP (“So we brought in the ninjas!”), and the Go! Puzzle games for download on the PlayStation 3 in 2007. Bonsai Barber, a hairdressing game, followed on Nintendo’s WiiWare download service; in 2009 Edge introduced him as a “GoldenEye designer turned WiiWare purveyor”.

Later work

Hollis has stayed a regular voice on games as a cultural form. In 2013 he was making a game about love for the GameCity festival in Nottingham, and told Edge that the console industry’s caution about sex owed more to “self-censorship” than to anything in game mechanics. Asked by Retro Gamer for his desert-island games in 2008, he chose Repton 2, Exile and The Sentinel from the BBC Micro years, and NetHack: “It’s a game for scientists and designers.”

Sources

Computer and Video Games issue 171, February 1996: GoldenEye preview (“Producer: Martin Hollis”; work began in January).
Edge issue 53, Christmas 1997, pp. 78–80, “The golden touch”: interview with Hollis, David Doak and Karl Hilton (Hollis as “game director/programmer”; Doom; the Onyx machines and the year to get the engine running; 380 megabits compressed to 96; the multiplayer decision in March; Stephen Ellis’s multiplayer code; Doak’s January 1995 start).
Edge issue 80, January 2000, p. 55: Martin Hollis, director, GoldenEye.
Retro Gamer issue 19, 2005, p. 79: Q&A with Martin Hollis (at Rare 1993–98; Perfect Dark’s first 14 months; the turned-down sequel; why he left; Zoonami set up in 2000).
Retro Gamer issue 46, 2008, pp. 80–83, Paul Drury, “Desert Island Disks: Martin Hollis”: date of birth; the ZX81, the BBC Micro and the type-ins; Trinity College; Frome; joining Rare; Killer Instinct and the Nintendo 64 chips; the design document and Tim Stamper; the team; Howard Lincoln’s fax; the falling out with the Stampers; Nintendo and the GameCube; Zoonami, Zendoku, Go! Puzzle; the desert-island games.
Edge issue 112, July 2002, p. 13: Hollis at E3, formerly head of software at Rare and an assistant to NTD on the GameCube; Zoonami “founded in 2000”.
Edge issue 137, June 2004, pp. 64–66, “Zoolook”: Funkydilla and a Q&A with Hollis (his contract; NTD and the GameCube; Zoonami set up at the end of 1999; seven core staff; the ten-million target; the sale of Rare).
Edge issue 209, Christmas 2009: “GoldenEye designer turned WiiWare purveyor”.
Edge issue 259, November 2013, p. 64: Hollis, “whose work spans GoldenEye 007 to Bonsai Barber”, on sex in games and GameCity 2013.
Wireframe issue 39, May 2020, pp. 28–31: Hollis on GoldenEye’s schedule and Howard Lincoln’s fax.
Wireframe issue 54, August 2021, pp. 30–31: Hollis on Nintendo’s influence and the closing credits.
Wikipedia, “Martin Hollis (video game designer)” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): joined Rare in December 1993; Zoonami’s games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Hollis_(video_game_designer)