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(intense music)
(electronic music)
- [Presenter] Final Fantasy VII.
- [Presenter] GoldenEye 007.
- We were all really
I think we were all kind of at that stage
in our lives where we were really hungry to do something.
- We were young and naive.
- Young and inexperienced,
and had no idea what they were doing.
- I wanted to show people that I could do this.
- It was our first game,
I don't think we knew quite what we had.
- [Presenter] It's a great lineup.
- [Presenter] The interactive title of the year.
(upbeat music)
- It was a movie license
done by a small team of inexperienced
developers and somehow ended up being
the greatest first-person shooter of its era.
- [Jimmy Fallon] This is one of the best video games
of all time.
- You couldn't ask for a better cocktail recipe.
- Here's your spy playground.
- The guns, the gadgets, the cars,
the girls, the memorable villains, amazing exotic settings.
- One of the most important video games yet made,
had a transformative effect on the industry.
You can look at the video game landscape today
and trace back its origins in GoldenEye.
- GoldenEye is one of those wonderful games
that almost splits the game industry into two times.
There's before GoldenEye and there's after GoldenEye.
- Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield,
all of that goes back to GoldenEye.
First-person shooters were really this PC elite genre.
3D gaming was really coming to
the fore for the first time.
The social element, the friendship element,
the skill and personal achievement, right?
It's one package that sums up all the reasons
I play and want to make games.
- [Narrator] Ah, the 1990s, a time of innocence,
optimism, and social cohesion, and Spice Girls.
There were no mobile phones, no social media,
the internet was but a whisper on the wind
and TV consisted entirely of the same
old channels we'd had for decades.
The video games industry was still young,
widely considered to be the realm of children
and toy makers, but it was changing fast
as game makers were still discovering what games could be.
Many video games have graced our screens over the years,
few are played decades later,
even fewer change the way we play.
This is the story of a game that did just that.
(intense music)
- [Narrator] Rare was founded in the 1980s
by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper.
The Stamper brothers began their journey
developing a series of acclaimed titles
for the ZX Spectrum and built themselves
quite a reputation for innovative high quality games.
In 1985, their work caught the eye
of Japanese gaming giant Nintendo.
In fact, Nintendo loved what they saw so much,
they invested in the fledgling outfit,
taking a 49% shareholding in the company.
This relationship would go down as one of the most
fruitful collaborations in video game history.
Together, they would go on to create
some of the most beloved video games of the nineties.
- [James Batchelor] What's amazing is that Rare
is this just, really...
at the time, it was this really reclusive developer.
They didn't tell you anything.
They were very kind of secret,
and so secret that not many people knew where they
were based, and they were based on
what used to be a farm in the Midlands.
- [Mick Gordon] Middle of England, a barn,
groups of people that had really not done
a lot of video game stuff before, were killing it.
- [Grant Kirkhope] Twycross is absolutely,
there's nothing in it.
Twycross is a village that contains, it's got one pub.
It's got a private school.
A bit further up the road there's Twycross zoo
which is quite famous, but that is it.
- [Krishan Sharma] You have this extremely talented
cutting edge
game development studio out in the middle of nowhere, right?
In countryside in England.
- [Mick Gordon] I mean over that period of what, six years,
they'd done some of the best 2D platformers,
some of the best 3D platformers,
one of the best fighting games,
one of the best racing games,
and certainly one of the best first-person shooters.
- [Grant Kirkhope] People underestimate the influence
of Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper.
They were just absolutely always in complete sync.
There was never a point in time where
those two guys didn't agree on something.
There was always absolute solidarity
and they knew exactly what they wanted.
There was never a time you could say, we're not sure.
Tim would always know how it needs to be
for that to be fantastic.
- [James Batchelor] The whole point of Rare was to do things differently,
to not just make the same games
that have come before, but it works for them.
They're kind of isolated a little bit
in that they're on this kind of farm style campus.
They've got different barns,
so different buildings where the different teams
make different games and they are
just in this little Rare world.
- [James Miskell] You know, when you buy a Nintendo game,
it would have the Nintendo seal of quality?
To me, the Rare logo, back then,
was the Nintendo seal of quality.
You knew you were getting an amazing game.
- [Grant Kirkhope] You used to always want to make the fact
that the Rare logo should sell the game
without even knowing about the review.
You see that blue R on that game box, you buy it.
- They just didn't make bad games.
- Rare was a very sort of clandestine place in some respects
nobody ever did interviews,
no one knew what we were up to until the game came out.
No one had any idea because Tim and Chris
weren't interested in fame,
we just work on the games, we focus on the games,
make them the best they can be,
we put them out and they do the talking.
- [Martin Watts] Rare was a very important
and iconic developer
back during the nineties, you know.
It really pushed the boundaries,
not just with the N64.
So, they developed Donkey Kong Country.
That was a game which used pre-rendered 3D graphics.
And for it to be on that console
at that time, it looked amazing.
- [David Craddock] They were able to render these gorgeous
3D models and then make them 2D sprites,
but they maintained almost the same level of graphical
fidelity as their original source models had.
It just made the Super Nintendo look
like it could be the next generation console.
It wasn't old. It was new again.
- [Mick Gordon] It was evident back in Donkey Kong Country
where they were using 3D development stuff
in a 2D environment to give the illusion of a 3D world.
Nobody was doing that at all.
- [Peer Schneider] So in the late nineties
we saw a lot of innovation around how games are played,
how games control, how camera systems work,
how progression in levels work, all of that stuff.
It was kind of this Wild West of developers
trying a whole bunch of different things.
And then, you know, over time,
certain things stuck around, certain things went away.
- [Graeme Mason] The PC market was absolutely booming
thanks to the advent of 3D graphics cards.
- [Ad Narrator] Welcome to the world of Doom.
A hellish nightmare for the more real...
- Because the PC was the home of the first-person shooter.
- [Tommy Thompson] We didn't call them first-person shooters.
We called them Doom clones
because everyone made games that were kind of like Doom.
- [Joao Diniz Sanches] First-person shooters,
let's remember at the time, weren't a thing,
they weren't a genre.
They were just shooters in a 3D environment.
- [Peer Schneider] The landscape for first-person shooters
was pretty young back then.
It was more about monster closets, fast paced shooting,
you know, skill-based gameplay,
but not really campaign-based
storytelling and puzzle solving.
- [Dan Ryckert] For me, FPS was just id games.
It was Wolfenstein and Doom because that's all I knew.
- [Tommy Thompson] And then moving into Quake and Unreal
around the same era as one another.
- [Joao Diniz Sanchez] You had kind of, you know
violent games beginning to kind of become popular.
And so you needed the consoles to match that.
- I'd seen really rad, awesome 3D stuff in the arcades
playing all sorts of video games like Virtua Cop and things.
But the concept of having three-dimensional
first-person shooter game at home was revolutionary.
- This transition from Mega Drive and Super Nintendo
to the PlayStation or even the Sega Saturn
adapting to these new forms is introducing
all these new challenges and problems.
- You'd seen some experimentations with 3D
on the Super Nintendo, things like Star Fox and F-Zero
and Pilotwings, and it was sort of fake 3D.
It wasn't really good 3D.
- Most interesting is how the different developers
kind of used this newfound power
of using the third dimension,
like how they would use it to create new experiences.
- It's also around this sort of time
that you had Tomb Raider.
Tomb Raider was made in Britain. You had Grand Theft Auto.
Grand Theft Auto was made in Scotland.
There were a lot of very kind of ambitious
creative UK developers trying to push the bounds
of this new 3D world and what we could do with it,
and they were having worldwide hits.
- [Karl Hilton] I'd been to lots of interviews in London.
It was like, great, London.
Then I ended up in a farmhouse in Warwickshire
it was quite bizarre.
- [Brett Jones] The actual layout was you have
the big farmhouse itself
which was sorting out all the minutia of the day.
You know, making sure the company works
and all that sort of stuff.
And then there were literally barns
where they used to keep the horses.
And these had been turned into offices
and each team was in one of the barns
and where the horse sort of stalls where
they'd been turned into our individual offices.
- [Steve Ellis] They were each big enough for
two or three people.
When I started, I had one to myself,
which was right next to the crèche.
So I got to hear kids playing all day.
- [Brett Jones] Of course there was no internet,
so it was like get on with this,
you're in your computer now, get on with it.
But it was really nice, that barn sort of feel to it.
- [David Doak] That was very much how Rare worked.
It was kind of everyone was in their little silo
and there was a Donkey Kong barn,
and there was a barn that ended up where Banjo was.
There was the Killer block, people making Killer Instinct.
- [Steve Ellis] I was 22 when I joined Rare.
I think the others were mostly about the same
or a little bit older.
Well, I was straight out of uni,
so I'd never worked on an actual
game that had been released.
- [Karl Hilton] 24 and no experience at all in making games.
Rare was my first job out of the university, so.
- [David Doak] I was a scientist.
So I was at Oxford University and I'd done my degree and PhD
and I worked in molecular structure determination.
- [Duncan Botwood] So I was about 23, I guess.
I had not got a degree at that point.
I'd dropped out of architecture.
- [Grant Kirkhope] For someone like me,
I really genuinely thought I'd just end up like a tramp.
I did the university thing, messed around in bands
for years and years to get to 33,
so 11 years as a long time just living at home with my mother.
I don't know, I would've just been a pub rocker
making 30 quid a night probably to this day.
- [Graeme Norgate] So when I joined Rare, I would have been,
I'd just turned 23 and all my experience up to that point
was playing games and wanting to do music for games.
- As well as the artists and programmers,
they wanted a system administrator
to go and run their Silicon Graphics network.
And at the time I was running a Silicon Graphics network
as part of my job in the lab. And I'd had a bad day...
I kinda thought, well, yeah, screw it. I'll apply for this.
- This was my first job. It was a good job.
I was earning more money than I ever had done before.
And I was getting to work on James Bond.
- The name's Bond, James Bond.
- A new project had come in from Nintendo.
They've got the rights to GoldenEye.
(upbeat music)
And they'd come to Rare and said,
would you lead a new team to make this GoldenEye game?
- [David Craddock] The offer for a movie game,
a movie tie-in game, came up to Rare.
It was kind of the last thing anyone wanted to do.
- They didn't really like making adult games.
They wanted to make broad appeal family games.
So GoldenEye was a little bit out of the ordinary for them.
- Martin Hollis was the guy who stepped up
and said, okay, I'll do this. This could be kind of fun.
And everyone else was like, great, cool.
We want to keep making our own games.
- [Narrator] Martin Hollis, a young, ambitious
university graduate from the south of England
had only been with Rare a short time
before the opportunity to make GoldenEye came up.
His total experience working in games
was a brief stint working on a coin-op
conversion of Killer Instinct, and that was it.
He was, however, a massive Bond fan,
as evidenced by this homage to
the infamous Bond gun barrel sequence
he made with his brothers as a young lad,
shown here at a GDC 2012 GoldenEye talk.
But making a game about Bond
would be a much larger challenge.
Hollis would have to build a team and a game from scratch.
Martin's first recruit to the team
was programming prodigy, Mark Edmonds.
A man of few words, Mark was in charge
of the core engine and AI systems.
Joining him was architecture graduate
turned lead artist, Karl Hilton,
and populating Karl's environments with character models
and animations was Brett Jones.
Duncan Botwood came aboard next as a designer
to work on level progression and mission structures,
programmer Steve Ellis was brought in
to code the weapons and explosion effects,
and David Doak joined to help craft the missions,
storylines, and objectives.
But what of GoldenEye's signature soundscape?
Well, that came courtesy of Graeme Norgate
and Grant Kirkhope, with the dynamic duo
providing the music and sound effects.
And last but not least, Adrian Smith
was the final piece of the puzzle,
joining the team to help with effects and UI.
- The level of ambivalence in terms of
the studio that's managing that project,
the publisher that's funding the project,
the license holder who also has a lot of say
in what that game should be...
James Bond is one of the biggest IPs in pop culture
and everyone's like, ah, they'll make it.
- Yeah, Martin Hollis came in one day, didn't know him.
Then Martin said, "I've been offered you for my new team."
I'm like, oh great, what is it?
He said, "Well, do you like James Bond movies?"
And at the time I was thinking, you know,
I love James Bond movies.
I'm thinking, but video game James Bond movies?
- [Simon Parkin] In the late nineties, every major film
that came along had to have a licensed video game attached.
And this was not because Hollywood, you know,
particularly valued or respected the video game industry.
It was like, this is a really useful marketing tool.
- Nobody believed that a GoldenEye game would work.
Licensed tie-in games at the time were like a toy.
You know, you had the baseball cap,
you had the lunchbox, and you had the video game.
- [Peer Schneider] Movie license games often failed
because the game play wasn't good. Right?
They were cranked out to just kind of hit
a deadline and kind of resemble
the franchises that were so popular.
- We all got Bond.
There wasn't some style sheet that we needed to read.
- We were James Bond fans.
We all wanted to be James Bond. That was the whole point.
- And I was able to rattle off a load
of kind of Bond ideas because I'd read all the books
and obviously seen all the films and so on.
So I wouldn't stop talking for about half an hour
about all the things we could do with it.
- I was a big Bond fan. So I watched all the Bonds.
- When the movies came out,
they were the biggest movie of the year, always.
The best effects, the best music,
everything was spectacular in Bond films.
So you always knew
you're in for a great ride on a Bond movie.
In the first few days,
I do remember sitting down and talking about
what kind of a game it should be.
I used to love playing Spy Hunter in the arcades.
Maybe it's a sort of Spy Hunter, sort of,
top-down driving game.
- [Graeme Mason] They wanted to do something for the Super Nintendo,
the SNES, I assume it would have been vastly
different given the different powers of the two machines,
probably a 2D platformer.
- Everyone was working on Super Nintendo at the time.
And Martin had said to them, I will do it,
but he wanted to work on the new console
that was coming along.
- Martin had the vision, you know,
he was the only guy that had actually done a game before.
So he was the one powering through this and saying,
you know, I think we'd like to do this.
I think we'd like to do that.
- Especially in those early phases,
it's Mark Edmonds and Martin Hollis.
But Mark was the engineer.
Mark essentially built the core engine
and an awful lot of the subsequent tools
that were available to the rest of the team
to start building all the level designs
and create all these really fun, unique experiences.
- Of course you have to remember,
first-person shooters got off to a much slower start on consoles.
Yes, there were ports of games like Wolfenstein 3D
and Doom on earlier systems like the Super Nintendo,
and the 32X, but technically they were really ugly
and kind of just stumbled compared to the PC counterparts.
- At the time, people are like,
a shooter won't work on consoles because you need a PC.
You need mouse control because it's more accurate
or you need a keyboard because you've
got so many different buttons, so many different options.
- They were much better suited, that sort of game,
to the PC because you can use the mouse to aim.
You can use the keyboard to move your character.
You can map different keys to different actions.
On a video game console controller,
you're much more limited in what you can do.
- At some point, details about the Ultra 64.
They were boasting about all this new power
that this console would have.
And at some point Martin got a brain storm
and decided that actually
this sort of game would work in 3D.
- We all knew it was coming. No one had seen it.
No one knew much about it but we knew
it was going to be a 3D console.
- With the early through mid-nineties,
you're going through this massive technological upheaval,
like consoles are adapting and being built
and being released like really frequently
and really quickly, the hardware is changing,
and in turn the software that we have to build
for it is changing as well.
At this transition from 2D into 3D gaming,
we don't really know what's the standard
by which we're going to build 3D games.
- Because the 3D thing was a new thing,
there wasn't a body of people with those experiences
or those skills, so you're almost
kind of taking a punt on people.
So like Karl, for instance, Karl Hilton
was an architecture graduate, you know,
and, yeah, he'd done a bit of messing around
doing 3D modeling, but not much.
- The developers are...
relatively new to this experience.
Many of them had never shipped a game before
and given a tremendous amount of freedom
to experiment and play around with ideas
and throwing things in ad hoc to see whether it sticks.
- And then we also were talking about different
shooters, particularly the Virtua Cop games.
- Originally it was supposed to be an on-rails game.
The feel of that is quite different.
- So you would go through each level at the same pace,
kind of almost Star Fox style or Time Crisis,
that sort of thing, and it would be the same each time.
And you just have to kind of improve your score each time.
- You didn't have control over movement,
but you could aim just in some of
the classic kind of arcade on-rails shooters.
- And they put everything in to make it play like Virtua Cop,
and then everyone was playing it and going
it's not any fun.
It looks like Virtua Cop, it moves like Virtua Cop,
it's got the Bond, but it's not fun.
- GoldenEye was one of those games that
kept on getting delayed and obviously
missed the release of the movie,
and even the home video release.
- It has the markings of like a small indie outfit now
who's got far more resource and budget
than anyone would potentially imagine
with no constraint on,
right, you've got to ship this in six months.
It's, we'll keep paying the bills,
but could you try and ship something?
- Nintendo is not like many other video game companies
in that, you know, it was able to say
it cares most, first and foremost about the quality
of the games that appear on its hardware.
So it's less about we need to hit this release date
so that we maximize our profits
because we're tying in with the film's release.
It's more like, no, we're gonna wait on this
until it's right, until it's ready, until it's good.
- Now there was concerns that it wasn't a very Nintendo-ish
product, it was quite, we got told
repeatedly it was too dark and it was violent.
To which our response was, well,
it's dark because the film's dark and it's violent
because it's James Bond and he kills people.
- There's a very well-known story now
that Martin Hollis tells about
late into the game's development receiving a fax
from Shigeru Miyamoto, who is still the most
famous video game designer in the world.
And certainly was at that time.
Sort of giving us feedback on GoldenEye,
and he says he doesn't like the violence.
He says it sort of feels tragic,
and is there no way that at the end of the game,
you as Agent 007 can visit the hospital ward
where all of the people that you've taken down
during the course of the game are sort of holed up
and can you not work your way down
the beds shaking everyone's hands?
It's obviously a very funny story, but it also illustrates,
I think, something about Nintendo
and Miyamoto's approach to video game design,
and probably their nervousness about a game
like GoldenEye appearing on their flagship hardware.
At one point they were even saying, well,
we're not sure about this. Maybe we just cancel it.
And because they'd rather lose that money
and preserve their reputation as a fantastic
video game publisher than they would to
recoup some of that money
and put something else out that's substandard.
- [Narrator] So let's do a quick summary. Shall we?
We have an inexperienced ragtag group
of university graduates working in a barn
somewhere in the English countryside
on a game based off a movie,
a game about a spy with a license to kill,
to be played on a console that didn't exist yet
for the company that brought you
Princess Peach and Zelda. Get all that?
- It's the N64! Oh my God!
- This holiday season, it's the new Nintendo 64.
So what's the big deal,
and why is Toys "R" Us already sold out?
- [David Doak] When we all got our production N64s
and everyone had Mario, and Pilotwings and stuff,
but particularly Mario,
literally people were sitting in offices
watching other people play Mario,
and everyone was going...
You know, jaw drop.
From the moment you pick up that game,
it just says, go, explore.
- It was symbolic of the time that, you know,
you had this new level of freedom, you know,
afforded by games like GoldenEye 007,
and Super Mario 64, and Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
You know, there was, I think, an emphasis
from a gameplay perspective to get
the players to go off and explore.
I remember the first time seeing Super Mario 64,
and it was really the first time I'd seen a 3D game
and it was like the world had changed.
And we're right on this tipping era
that we'll never see again in the same way
of moving from two dimensions to three dimensions,
which was such a tremendous shift
in the way that not only games would be made,
but also thought about, but also played.
- That just blew people's minds.
You can wander around doing stuff that you'd never been able
to do before, exploring the game in a way
that you'd never been able to.
- I had that curiosity, I was just like,
oh, what's that over there?
N64 games and GoldenEye specifically,
which led me to be the games tester that I am now.
You know, that curiosity, I was just like,
let's zoom into that with a sniper rifle.
There's a thing over there. How do we get over there?
Don't know, we'll find out.
And then you go to Facility and you poke around
all the corners and you see some flasks
and a vent and you're like, who put flasks up there?
- It just had this go anywhere, do anything,
kind of flavor to it even though
it's not really an open world game.
A lot of the levels kind of feel like you
can kind of go everywhere, go anywhere,
and just play around with it.
And so it was just such an open feeling.
- Before GoldenEye, most first-person shooters
operated with the Doom clone mentality.
Shoot everything that moves, collect the keys,
go through the doors, find the exit, rinse and repeat.
GoldenEye, depending on the difficulty you selected,
would give you different objectives.
It's not just A to B.
Some of them are A to B, but it's A to B
via objectives C, D, and E.
Here's a level, this is what you need
to do in the level before you leave.
- Doom had it to a point and Quake had it to a point
where there's keycards, right?
Blue, the gold, the red, but it was kind of rudimentary,
'cause it was early nineties gaming, you know?
GoldenEye come out, and it was just like,
no, we have to talk to this character over here.
That's never happened to me before in a video game,
in terms of FPS, I have to then look at my watch
to get something, throw it at a thing,
it was doing so many things new and fresh at the time,
but looking back like it completely rewrote
the rules for video games, FPS and otherwise.
(intense music)
- It wasn't until, I would say, 1997,
kind of the year that first-person shooters
exploded on the Nintendo 64,
when you had this perfect union of a controller
that was up to the job of playing FPS
and hardware that was up to the job of running
and displaying FPS that the genre
really took off on consoles.
- Within the year of GoldenEye coming out in 1997,
there was Doom 64, which isn't a port of Doom,
it's a completely separate Doom game
that was made with id Software's blessing,
Hexen 64, which is a direct port of the game,
but also, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.
- It was very impressive from a lot of standpoints,
very complex worlds were built.
The characters were not sprites anymore.
They were fully 3D again
and had pretty intricate animations.
- When you see something like that and you look at your own work,
and all you can see are the things that are wrong with it.
You know, you're thinking, oh God,
we're miles behind on this.
I remember being really worried because it had very nice
looking art and it ran really smoothly.
It had really good frame rate because they had the fog
a lot of the time and these dinosaurs
would run out of the fog at you at a really nice frame rate.
You'd be like, oh, that's nice.
We did look at that and think, oh,
do we need to go back and try and get the game
to run faster, is there anything else I can do?
Should we be turning off the Z buffer and things like that?
Yeah, it was a real benchmark for us.
- [Duncan Botwood] So I started building the dam
without any real technical knowledge
and I was playing around with the size of it and we realized
we could take the movies as a source for sure.
And we also look at the set models and the set diagrams
that they'd drawn out, that they built.
- And he just built the dam
and then we put it in and it's like, woah!
- We ended up with this real sprawling mass of a level
that was running at an abysmally low frame rate.
- So then that's why you have the tunnels leading up to it,
was to try and cut as much of the views off as possible.
You know, and then I went through and basically hacked
as many polys out as I could.
There'd be a big thing
that Martin put up which would show you
the frame rate you currently had.
So I could spin around and look at what he was doing.
And then suddenly the framerate would drop horrendously.
It's like, right, what's over there?
Okay. Go in, hack around.
- [Duncan Botwood] That was a kind of awakening for me.
Like, oh yeah, it's got to run. Oh, okay.
- The engine was great because I could sit there
on my machine and play with stuff
and then immediately make the level,
put it in the game, and then try it out again.
So I could just go through this process
of just hacking away at this.
So you start off with levels that look fantastic.
And by the time I'd finished with them,
they were sort of a bare bones.
- And we got to go to Leavesden Studios,
where they were filming GoldenEye.
And we had a day's visit there.
And because I had this very rare thing
called the digital camera at the time,
which was this massive, massive, heavy camera.
My job was to go round and film and, you know,
try and get reference for everything.
And we saw St. Petersburg where they had the tank chase
and that was all still up.
And then inside one of the actual studios was the huge,
you know, the villain's lair set at the end.
And we saw that while it was in its pristine condition.
Then we went back the second time
we saw it in its blown up condition.
- Martin was very pragmatic about stuff.
It's like, you go off and make what you want to make.
And then we'll look at it and work out
how we're going to get it to work.
It was all very, very co-operative.
It was never like, this is what you do.
This is how you do it. Don't break these rules.
It was much more, what kind of things do you need?
- [David Doak] A good example is the frigate.
That's in it because in the film
there's a helicopter is on a frigate in Monaco.
So Karl had built the frigate and we had
a helicopter model and that was it.
So it was like, well, okay,
so what are you going to do in that level?
Maybe you're trying to rescue hostages.
Well, that sounds like it might work.
Okay. Well, let's roll with that.
- Someone would come back in and go actually, Mark,
what would also be great, can we do this?
Can we have them like dodge roll
or hide behind cover, like, okay.
That's not in there now, and then a couple of days later,
boom, it appears in the source.
- [Adrian Smith] I was then doing a lot of the gun modeling.
So I was working in conjunction with Mark Edmonds,
not only to get the front end in,
'cause I had to model all the hands.
It was myself and Mark that came up with the HUD,
and I should have trademarked that
because the HUD was pretty much then the go-to
front end for any of the consoles.
- It was always, what can we do? What can we create?
What sort of things can we do? How do we do it?
- Creates this kind of crazy cycle of iteration,
everything that Mark Edmonds was doing
and building, that code base,
but also allowing the designers that kind of level
of flexibility to just create whatever they wanted.
He was working really hard in this whole backend
that was reduced into byte code
that was really performant and ran super quick
on what was ultimately very limited hardware on the N64.
- [Narrator] Under the watchful eye of the Stampers,
the team would work long days and weekends
polishing and refining the gameplay levels and difficulty.
They would even bring in elements of the extended James Bond
universe to create a game overflowing with content
and creativity, but would it pay off?
(upbeat music)
- [Grant Kirkhope] These days, you can load up a synth patch
put your finger on a keyboard and it's this
huge, great, swathe of sound that's just incredible.
It's just amazing, but we couldn't do that then.
Most of the sounds in GoldenEye are probably
16 or 11 kilohertz, right down at the bottom end.
Like bass drums, you put them in at eight, you know.
So, you know, it's a quarter
of the quality that you would get on a CD.
- The gas plant music is a particular one.
You know, that opening kind of, "doo, doo".
When I hear that, I still get a bit goosepimply about it.
The music and the soundscape and the pacing itself
it's like, now you're Bond.
- It's what I love, I think, is it sounds like a score.
Every song feels like it's come
from the same soundtrack. It feels cohesive.
And that's very difficult to do.
Their ability to carve a theme
and create an emotion
and a feeling that instantly linked you
to whatever your goal was, whatever your mission was,
but also whatever the environment was,
whether it's a snowy sort of area
or a sneaky area through a facility.
- GoldenEye, I think, is an excellent example
of having a believable world that you can explore
and you add kind of, you know,
atmospheric music and then you've got action, et cetera.
You begin to build the sense of a narrative-led
first-person shooting experience,
which obviously we have, you know, everywhere now.
- Their ability to use nothing more
than a limited sound palette and a series of notes
is what makes that a great score.
A lot of thought had gone into creating,
again, a believable aural landscape.
- With Graeme Norgate doing the sound design,
the gun sounds in that game are really,
really good for their time.
That soundscape was crafted with
just absolute love and respect.
- [Graeme Norgate] It's a luxury of being in-house.
We could play the game, so you'd load up Servenya,
walk through it, play it, and you'd get the idea for it.
And you could write something and have that playing
whilst you're playing the level again,
and, you know, iterate.
- That's another person who is a talented person
at the height of their skills,
trying to do something really well.
And then it all came together.
- [Steve Ellis] When I joined the project
they weren't any effects really,
so I think the first thing that I worked on was explosions.
- Everything explodes. It's ridiculous.
- Yeah, everything did explode if you shot it
long enough, I think, pretty much.
- But it's part of the world.
It's like you're in this world and there's this
kind of brittle consequence for things
and this escalating calamity if you do something wrong
and this explodes, this explodes,
then this scientist gets blown across the room.
- [Steve Ellis] Yeah. I spent ages working on that.
I think it was more than a month on the explosions.
Effects are always one of the most expensive things.
They can have quite a large impact on the frame rate
of the game, the responsiveness.
- That sense of immersion and impact on the game world
is another thing that's going to keep
bringing players back to keep playing
because it's a space that they can control
in more of a way than they could with things like Doom.
- It's not in Doom, there's not that collateral damage.
And the idea that the environment is mutable in some way.
It was something that was really important to us.
- [Duncan Botwood] The job I was not expecting
when I answered an advertisement for a game designer
and document writer was to be stuffed into a sweaty
neoprene suit and asked to fall over. But...
(rhythmic grunting noises)
(screaming)
One day, I was asked to put on a sweaty neoprene suit
that'd been used for Killer Instinct and to fall over a lot.
- [Brett Jones] I would have Mr. Botwood there,
all covered in the markers,
and then depending on how he was
going to get killed at that point,
he would either have a rope around him
and I'd yank him or he would get pushed
or he would get kicked in the knee.
You know when you see those guys, they get shot in the shoulder
and you see them do that?
That's me literally going like that and pushing him
on the shoulder until he moves
because you can't anticipate because
otherwise there's that (deep breath).
He was battered, he was really battered.
(laughing)
(rhythmic grunting noises)
- [Steve Ellis] I remember one time Tim Stamper got the team
into a conference room and explained to them
that it's not a university project and it does
need to be finished at some point.
- [Graeme Norgate] Regardless of the game being late
and missing deadline after deadline, you know,
it wasn't because we were putting our feet up.
- I believe they were all in their late twenties
or early thirties. Most of them were single.
They could work 100 hour weeks.
You know, whether we think that's good
or not with hindsight, that was something
that they wanted to do and did willingly.
And we were the beneficiaries of that toil.
- It was like a company culture of,
you don't just go home at five o'clock, that's for sure.
- We used to work late at Rare.
We used to like being there.
- Right from the start, we'd be there till midnight
and working weekends and stuff.
- You didn't have to stay,
but it was kind of assumed that you would.
So most of the time we did.
- [David Doak] We thought the game was going to be
really bad.
So that was always the thing.
It's like, A, there's not enough variety.
It's going to be boring. It's just running and shooting.
And also we're not going to get all the levels finished.
- It was hugely late, and it was massively full of bugs.
There was just so many things wrong with it
that it sort of became that game
that we all thought would never actually come out in the end.
- Hi, I'm Ken Lobb.
I'm here to tell you about the Nintendo 64 hardware.
- [Karl Hilton] Ken Lobb was a big fan of the game.
I mean, we had a lot of support, particularly from America.
- And here we have the controller ports.
I'd like you to notice that we have one, two, three, four.
- [Peer Schnieder] Nintendo 64 shipped with
four controller ports, right?
And Mario Kart 64 obviously demonstrated to the world
how to properly use those four ports.
- You know, from the very offset,
the machine comes with four players.
Now you still have to buy two other controllers,
but not if your mates bring them around with them, right?
So as a developer, you're then beginning to think,
let's try and use it, perhaps there is something in here.
- That was a big departure from having to configure
your LAN and having multiple copies of every game
and playing across all these different monitors.
- [Steve Ellis] I'm gonna say roundabout April or May, '97,
we started work on it. Seems insanely close.
- [Duncan Botwood] In the meantime, Nintendo of America
are going, you are finishing the game, right?
You're not trying to put multiplayer in or anything are you?
No, no, no we're not. No.
It's fine. Yeah, we're finishing the game.
- [David Doak] There was no way Martin going to be able
to go to management and say, you know what?
We'd really like to put multiplayer in.
'Cause just like no, you're failing to do the thing
you're supposed to be doing,
don't be asking for more time.
I just remember the day we showed it to Ken
because Ken would come over every kind of,
couple of months, something, to Rare.
I remember him coming over and we'd set up.
It was in the office where Steve and Duncan were
we had TV and we had with the four controllers sitting.
So that was the thing. So he came in,
I just remember, walked in with Ken,
Ken, we've got something to show you.
And he's like, wow!
Ken was always... He used to say,
Oh my God, you guys! It's like, yeah, it works.
- And he was so excited by it
that he wanted to be the one who revealed it
to the testers at Nintendo.
- So Treehouse is NoA's, Nintendo of America's,
testing and kind of like game evaluation department,
which Ken Lobb was heavily involved in,
and we started to get feedback from them,
which was, you know, people are coming in
and playing at the weekend.
It's like, you know, everyone wants
to be testing your game, all that kind of stuff.
Going to E3 was kind of seen as a break for us
because we were close to gold
and there was a big testing push while we were there.
- When we were at E3, we had the smallest stand
because nobody really knew what we were doing,
but it was played all the time.
- [Karl Hilton] We had a playable version on the floor
and the booths were absolutely rammed.
I remember watching everyone playing it
and just really enjoying it.
So you thought, okay, well this is good.
- But it was being played all the time.
The entire time, you know, you were there,
you could just see people playing GoldenEye.
It was busy, really busy the whole time.
- [Narrator] Bolstered by the positive feedback
from E3 and testing, the team
head into the final stretch with their spirits high.
All their hard work and dedication
appeared to be paying off,
but just as the game was about to be shipped,
an order came through from mission headquarters.
- Yes. I made Timothy Dalton, Roger Moore, and Sean Connery.
And I made them all particularly
because I gave them all different types of jackets.
So one of them had a white one on,
one had a little red carnation.
One of them had the double breasted suit.
So yeah, I have pictures of them all
because I definitely made them.
- Got a fax I think it was in those days,
saying you can't have the other Bonds in it.
We don't have the rights.
- There is one cartridge with all four Bonds in.
And I think I know who has it at the moment,
but we had to take them out because Sean Connery
wouldn't let us use his likeness.
- [Narrator] In a somewhat ceremonial goodbye,
the team played one final death match.
Doak, Hollis, Edmonds, and Hilton
took part in a three-hour marathon session
to decide who was the ultimate James Bond.
- So we thought, well, we need to have a final game.
So we all sat around one evening and played it,
and yeah, I can't remember who won.
It wouldn't have been me,
but I usually played Roger Moore 'cause he was my favorite.
- [David Doak] When we were making it,
we were just trying to get it finished.
That was an overarching memory
of particularly the last year was just,
can we just please get it finished?
Because it's just taking forever.
- You get to the end of the game and you are blind
to what's good about it and all you can see
is all the things that were on your wishlist
that you haven't had the time to do.
So you kind of only see its flaws.
- You see all the things that are wrong with it.
We knew the frame rate was awful in places,
there were loads of art that I did
that we didn't manage to get in.
There were game ideas that we didn't get in.
It was late and we knew the film had long since gone.
So, you know, whether anyone was going
to be remotely interested in it when it came out,
I had no idea at all.
- [Narrator] After working some utterly back-breaking hours,
the game was finally deemed finished
and sent to the distributors.
GoldenEye 007 released on the 25th of August, 1997.
- [Simon Parkin] GoldenEye was not a smash hit on day one
like in the way that the really big games are today.
- [Radio voice] GoldenEye 007 not only defined a generation,
but defied all expectation.
- [Brett Jones] It was more word of mouth
and sort of a snowball effect.
- [Martin Watts] When it did finally release and everyone
started playing it and people start playing the multiplayer,
there was a real buzz around it.
People were talking about, you know,
people talking about it at the playground, at work.
- You like shoot people in the head
when they're having a shit in the toilet in the air vent,
and I'm just like, this sounds interesting.
- Shooting that dude who was on the toilet
and just being like, oh, you poor bastard.
I felt so bad for him.
- Straight away you were there. You were James Bond.
You were playing James Bond, and that was it.
- Definitely the first time just sticking the cartridge in,
turning it on, and it was that audio cue. Shoo!
And then you knew your life was different.
- When I got that cartridge finally at home,
literally I played throughout the night.
- My friend and I rented it like that first weekend
it was out and it was just all we did.
- I just spent the whole weekend playing GoldenEye.
- There was only one copy of GoldenEye
left in the Toys "R" Us shelves in Chatswood,
and I remember I bought the game first
because I didn't want anyone else to have that game.
- There'd be four of us playing.
There would be four behind the couch waiting to play.
There would be three more making sandwiches in the kitchen.
There'd be another two turning up after school.
That's what we did, we played GoldenEye
for two years straight.
- Here is your spy playground.
- You felt like you were somewhere
and you were actually going towards something,
and, you know, working towards
a proper goal in a real place.
- I remember the sense of wonder.
Just walking through the dam for the first time
and sort of feeling the big open spaces
that actually felt like big open spaces.
- That's the freedom that keeps you coming back.
- So glad they had the vision to go,
what if we just took James Bond off the rails
and give the player the ability
to run around and do what they want?
- You know, running into this gate
and going like, where do I go, pulling out your gun,
shooting the lock, it just blew our minds at the time.
- If you played it like you played Doom,
you'd fail the mission.
You had to use your brain,
and I think that's what helped it spread.
- It was the game everyone wanted to play.
Growing up as a PlayStation player,
and my friends who had 64s,
we were just filled with jealousy
that we could not play a game that was that good.
- I don't think I really appreciated at the time
just how much enthusiasm that the game,
you know, the game generated.
- I think the enemies really brought that game to life.
- You'd occasionally walk around a corner
and just find one scratching their bum or something like that.
Really, really bizarre.
But that little detail made a change.
- Everyone says it, but the animations like, ah,
you shot him in the hand, he's shaking it around.
You shoot him in the knee or the bum cheek
and he clenches it? Brilliant, like number one.
Then you shoot the hats off and you think,
what else can this game do?
- You could use your silencer and take out
enemies without alerting other guards.
You could take out the security cameras.
These stealth mechanics really hadn't been seen,
especially in the first-person shooter genre.
- Guards were on routes and everything,
and you could memorize them,
and you'd know when you would see their head pop up
like over a snow dune and when you could shoot him,
like I felt like I was being sneaky
for the first time in a game.
- Some of the greatest memories I have
is getting through that level in a certain time limit
and doing certain conditions to unlock certain things.
The feeling of achieving that was great.
- If you wanted to extend the life
of the game as a player,
you earn that extension rather than
buying it and downloading it, right?
And it was always in there.
- I got every single one of them,
except Facility,
which was just so difficult.
- You have to have Dr. Doak
in the right place at the right time.
- You are having the run of your life,
but you could never bank on Dr. Doak
being in the right spot.
It was just the biggest bunch of bullshit of all time.
- The way you shoot him and then feel slightly bad about it,
but it's fun and you can get away with it, so why not?
- I think there's a certain magic that happens
that GoldenEye taught all of us,
that sitting shoulder to shoulder with somebody on a couch,
even if we're on two separate TVs,
playing something, getting the reaction,
feeling the energy, right, is a magical moment.
- All you needed was one Nintendo 64,
one copy of the game, four controllers, and a TV.
The idea that you could all play on one screen,
all four of you racing down corridors,
sniping each other, laughing your heads off.
It was as much fun for an audience
as it was for the players. It was just hysterical to watch.
- GoldenEye came out and it brought everyone
out of their rooms, out of their bedrooms,
into the lounge room together, you know,
shoulder to shoulder, having a great time.
- It was some of the best times of my life,
you know, just with my friends.
- What was great was it was so customizable.
- Custom matches and the one-shot kills,
Man with the Golden Gun, Slappers Only.
- You'd go to play GoldenEye at a friend's house
and you'd choose Oddjob and everyone would (deep breath)
and the guy in the corner of the room
would stop playing the piano and everything like that.
It was just not done.
- He'd be the smallest one.
And you'd fight to play Oddjob.
- Anyone who chose Oddjob was the biggest
asshole in the lounge room.
- It just made it all the more fun, all the more social.
And it kind of made me look forward
to actually hanging out with my family,
which I don't do so much now.
- Gaming really is inherently social.
The first games that were commercial were in arcades
where you'd have to go out and be among other people.
Sometimes your friends,
sometimes you'd meet complete strangers.
And it kind of recreated that arcade feeling
of standing behind the players at the controls,
putting your quarter on the dash, and saying, I got next.
- After GoldenEye, every FPS that came out,
people were asking what kind of multiplayer modes,
how are you handling split-screen, how does it run?
- GoldenEye became the game that set
the gold standard for first-person shooters on console.
It was the template that the genre
would follow on consoles going forward.
- [Presenter] The interactive title of the year...
is GoldenEye.
(audience cheers)
- [Brett Jones] Getting a BAFTA was awesome.
Yeah, especially because it was
at the interactive Oscars,
Martin had to go up and give a speech
and thank everybody for working on the team.
And he mentioned all the team members by name,
and then he paused and he went...
- And Duncan Botwood.
(laughter)
- Because he'd forgotten him. That was a good moment.
- [Steve Ellis] So the whole team was there
and it was the first time they ran those awards
and we won four of them, including the top one.
So we were pleased with that.
- We got copies of those. We've all got copies of those.
We had to pay for them but we got copies of them
and they say "copy" on the back.
But they are real BAFTAs and they weigh a ton
and I'm very proud of them, and they sit in my living room
and they get polished once a year.
- [David Doak] Looking back at it, I think there was
a lot of talent on the team, you know.
It's certainly some of the most talented
people I've ever worked with were on that team.
- [Graeme Norgate] I still don't really, you know,
I don't even believe it personally.
I just, I still couldn't do the connect
between what was happening in the real world, and, you know,
what we'd just spent two and a half years making.
- And it's still like, wow, we did a really good job.
We have no idea what we were doing.
- Obviously like the critical acclaims
super nice to see. It was extra special.
My first game, don't get me wrong,
it's the first box I had in my hand,
that was like, oh my God, I'm on this, you know.
But I was slightly detached
I guess towards the end of it.
- GoldenEye kept winning awards,
and at some point it just, I don't know,
it stopped being a thing that was very interesting
because it just, yeah, it just won all the awards.
One thing I do remember is on the walk back
from the AIS awards in Atlanta back to the hotel,
I remember saying to the team,
it's all downhill from here.
We're never going to do anything else this successful.
At that point, we'd just won everything.
- [Narrator] With the game on store shelves
and the team taking a well-earned breather,
the word on the street was spreading quickly.
GoldenEye was the new game in town,
an innovative, boundary pushing
cocktail of action-adventure.
The game was a critical darling,
ushering in new levels of innovation across areas
including visuals, animation, sound,
storytelling, and artificial intelligence.
GoldenEye was innovative in so many ways,
but one of the most significant was stealth.
Rare replaced the search and destroy mentality
of the Doom genre with mission objectives.
From there on in, the bullet was no longer
the only solution to every problem.
This freedom of choice would have
a long lasting impact on the industry,
challenging our expectations of what games could be
and paving the way for a whole new genre
of stealth games to emerge.
It was official, James Bond had arrived in video games,
selling 8 million copies, earning critical acclaim,
and a host of awards.
Turns out, the world of international espionage
was a perfect formula for video game success.
The game was so successful, in fact,
it even surpassed the film.
Together, they would reignite the Bond franchise
and introduced James Bond to a whole new generation.
The big question would be,
could future games live up to the bar set by GoldenEye?
- [Simon Parkin] Steven Spielberg's son Max was playing
GoldenEye with his friends one day and Spielberg
walks past and looks at the telly,
and at that time I think he was just coming to the end
of his work on Saving Private Ryan
and can immediately see the creative synchronicity
or potential between a video game like GoldenEye
with a view through a first-person perspective
and a period in history, such as World War 2,
and immediately from there sort of asks
the designers at Electronic Arts to mock up an idea
of how they could perhaps remodel
the Normandy landings, I believe, or D-Day,
using first-person shooter mechanics.
- We all talk about the flying into the head,
but that's such a subtle but important design decision
that literally immerses you in it.
Okay, now you are in the role of James Bond.
Now you are this character,
and now we're going to send you through this adventure.
- No one had done something set in a
realistic world where, there were real things there,
there were like tanks, there were jet airplanes,
there were ships, there were normal guns.
I say normal guns like machine guns, silenced pistols,
sniper rifles, everything was recognizable,
including the bad guys, obviously Russians
a lot of the time.
So all of a sudden we went from having
all these fantastical elements
to you had actually a real situation
that you could identify with.
- And that's something that has definitely, I think,
impacted the single-player design team on Call of Duty.
We never take you out of the role
of that person you're playing.
It is a first-person experience.
Every action you do, whether you're climbing up an ice wall
or whether you're, you know,
in an explosion, you're shell shocked
and you're watching the events,
you're watching it from the eyes of that person.
And I think that's something that GoldenEye
set the standard for
because they knocked it out of the park and they proved
to us how effective that can be.
- [Peer Schneider] I think after GoldenEye we saw more games
moving away from hell demons and dragons
and fantasy
and recreating that kind of more realistic approach.
Like if you think of the Tom Clancy's franchise,
I think, you know, GoldenEye really showed everybody
that you could have, you know,
this kind of real-world setting with spies,
and, you know, make it a success.
- Metal Gear Solid was still like the next year.
And a whole host of stealth games like Thief and Tenchu.
So they were all, you know, a year away or so.
- [Tommy Thompson] GoldenEye and its ability to experiment
becomes a progenitor for games like Thief: The Dark Project,
where it's entirely stealth oriented.
- [David Craddock] GoldenEye was the first
first-person shooter that actually made PC developers notice
the genre on console and say, oh,
we need to do something like this too
or we'll get left behind.
- Half-Life came out after GoldenEye,
and it was interesting to hear the developers
of Half-Life speak about how
they were influenced by GoldenEye.
- [David Craddock] They delayed Half-Life to make sure
that Half-Life's AI was up to snuff with GoldenEye's AI.
- One of the things that GoldenEye
in particular really sells are moving away,
not just from old light gun games, like Virtua Cop,
but even established first-person shooter franchises
like Doom, is it's the first game
that really embodies systemic design.
This idea that you can create a sandbox
which can just be reduced to outright anarchy,
where scientists are running away in panic
because you're standing there with two Klobbs
and shooting just relentlessly
at a couple of soldiers who are then trying to hit an alarm,
but you've also shot a barrel which then
causes this cascade of explosions
throughout this room and then that's catching scientists
and killing them or it's blowing up
the guy that you're trying to hit.
And these are things that you can't program that.
You can only build the tools within the world
that enable for these sorts of things to occur.
And it's crazy because now so many big games
try and embody systemic design.
That is literally the blueprint that Far Cry runs on,
that they want to have you be attacked by a tiger,
but you're also on a paraglider
and then you can drop down and throw a C4
on a Jeep, which lands on a civilian.
Like these are the things that now we're expecting.
People jump into Red Dead Redemption 2,
and they get really excited when someone
gets kicked in the face by a horse.
But GoldenEye, it was the first time
we ever really saw something like that.
And then subsequently you can start manipulating that.
And that becomes incredibly fun of, well,
what happens if I try and lure the scientists
in front of me because they're trying
to run out the back door,
but they are trying to attack me,
and then can I get them to shoot the scientists? I wonder.
And then you run off as your own little research
scientist of your own, you know,
you're putting on your own white coat,
like, let's see if we can just cause chaos
and it makes it insanely replayable.
- You can draw a direct line, I think,
from GoldenEye to Halo.
- [James Batchelor] I would argue that Halo: Combat Evolved
wouldn't be what it was if it weren't for GoldenEye.
I think it followed kind of the structure of
what GoldenEye was in terms of these larger open levels,
in terms of this kind of free flowing 3D movement
and letting you kind of explore
the level at your own kind of pace.
I think that influenced things like Halo
and then Halo inspired Call of Duty and all the others.
It all leads on, it all influences each other.
- After GoldenEye, we all thought Rare
would make another Bond game.
I mean, you roll the credits on GoldenEye,
it says James Bond will return.
And obviously that's what the movies do,
but we all hoped that Rare was saying,
hey, we had a blast making this game.
We're going to give you another FPS like GoldenEye,
maybe for the next Pierce Brosnan movie. Didn't happen.
- [Brett Jones] We were going to do the next Bond license.
That was the plan. But because GoldenEye
sort of reinvigorated the franchise,
suddenly the money went up
suddenly it's like, if you want to do this,
you're gonna have to pay for it.
- The movie license wasn't that expensive
the first time round, as I understand it,
Obviously with the success of GoldenEye,
then the price goes up and we were told quite early on
that it's unlikely we would do the next one
because they weren't going to get the license.
You know, you're slightly disappointed.
You're also sort of, actually,
probably it's better to do our own thing now.
- We know how to make a video game now.
So we're just going to make a better one.
- It's actually really hard to do spiritual successors.
To actually encapsulate or capture
what were the magic qualities of that particular game.
- [Stuart Ashen] Can you recreate something like that?
Can you, you know, catch the lightning in a bottle twice?
It was very much a product of the time.
- People have tried that, it's super, super, super, hard.
- [Blaine Morehead] You know, GoldenEye kind of set up this
expectation, I think, with audiences that, oh,
these Bond games are going to be,
or at least should be, as good as GoldenEye,
like, you know, Rare set the standard.
And so there was just this expectation in place.
- After GoldenEye, the history of Bond games
is very very erratic.
- I didn't quite realize how big of a deal
it was that Rare lost the rights to Bond,
in that I heard that Tomorrow Never Dies was coming out.
- Tomorrow Never Dies had a tie-in on the PlayStation.
And I think that was PlayStation hoping that, you know,
well, GoldenEye did gangbusters for Nintendo,
Tomorrow Never Dies will do the same for us.
- Sweet, it's the sequel to GoldenEye.
And I remember getting that and playing it and being like,
this is not GoldenEye at all. This is nothing close.
Like I don't know, they really screwed up.
Like, not knowing that it was a completely different team,
different everything.
- You're running round levels,
like running around sets to the film,
but it wasn't quite as accurate as Rare had managed.
I remember reading reviews of Tomorrow Never Dies,
and thinking like, ah, that's too bad.
- You have The World Is Not Enough afterwards,
which they kind of like, okay,
let's not mess with the GoldenEye formula.
Clearly James Bond works in first person.
We'll do another first-person shooter.
And it was good, but it was another developer
and it didn't quite have the same Rare magic.
I think it did feel very kind of A to B,
very kind of linear.
- I remember thinking that like, okay,
this has gotta be the GoldenEye that I wanted.
And it's like, ah, that's not it either.
And then I found out, oh, okay.
The team that made that is making this game
called Perfect Dark,
and that's the closest you're gonna get to GoldenEye.
- [Ad Narrator] Welcome to 2023.
- So Perfect Dark came along in 2000,
and it was Rare's second effort in this realm
of first-person shooter and it was highly anticipated.
Like yeah, I mean, you did it right the first time.
Let's just do that again. Just give me more of that.
- A big thing with Perfect Dark was escaping
what we saw as the confines of the GoldenEye universe.
- We could make up the storyline,
we can make up the characters.
We could do whatever the hell we wanted with it.
We could make it darker. We could make it bigger.
We could go into space. We could have laser pistols.
You know, that was the point.
We could do anything we wanted with this one
because we weren't restricted.
- And then you're on to the next thing,
so after GoldenEye we were doing Perfect Dark
and we were going to make this game
so much better than GoldenEye.
- Perfect Dark certainly feels
like an evolution of GoldenEye. It clearly is.
It still feels very similar,
but obviously everything is opened up.
- In a lot of ways, it was the kind of
sequel that the fans wanted.
It doubled down on the multiplayer aspect,
you had bots, you had much more customization
you could do in the multiplayer, lots more weapons,
just a huge array of things.
But then it went kind of off the rails,
like Indiana Jones 4 style, with aliens and stuff like that.
I don't know, it got a little silly.
- The big fight we had, myself
and Martin and others on the team,
we really wanted to have a female character.
- Jeanne d'Arc, yes.
Joan of Arc, that's where it comes from originally.
And that was Dr. Doak's idea.
- Just because it was such a misogynist industry.
It's nice to look back on that and to think
that we kind of got to push something there
because we had some clout at the time.
- Perfect Dark sold a little over 2 million copies,
I think, as compared with GoldenEye's 8 million.
- The debate between whether GoldenEye or Perfect Dark
is the better game is a very complicated one.
And there's going to be lots of people
on each side of the fence.
You can break Perfect Dark really badly.
I mean, you can do stuff that brings the game to a crawl.
- [Naz Pattison] Although certainly what they were
doing with bots and stuff was incredible.
There are a lot of features,
like the counter operative stuff was amazing.
There were so many great ideas in it, but I think for me,
it just didn't come out at the right time.
- GoldenEye just never left the machine as a multiplayer.
And even though Perfect Dark has more stuff
going on in there in terms of AI, weapons,
laptop guns, you know, it has more, but again,
when it comes to a quick plug and play session
with your mates, less is more, you know?
(upbeat music)
- [Speedrunner] Right here, it's this one. My insane pace.
- [Karl Jobst] Oh my God.
- [Speedrunner] I wait, I wait, I wait,
right when he starts firing to try to backboost me.
The double. Body armor. Two quick ones.
I already know I'm getting there on the perfect line.
Oh, fuck, what a run.
Fuck.
I can't even play anymore tonight after that.
It's... I don't know.
Oh! Fuck!
Fuck. Oh my God. Oh my God.
- [Ryan White] My friends, hello and welcome
to GoldenEye SpeedLore, the series where
we look at the speed run world record progression
of a stage in GoldenEye, and the stories...
So speed running is the act of trying to beat a video game
or a part of a video game as quickly as possible.
And it might sound crazy to some,
but it's kind of this additional challenge
that anyone can do in a game.
- The cheat system in GoldenEye was one of
the things that really drove the initial desire
to beat the levels fast because you had to clear
a level on a particular difficulty under a certain time
in order to unlock the cheats.
- Speed running now, after 2010 or even
the mid-2000s, started getting popularity,
but GoldenEye was big from the start.
- [Wes McKinney] When I took over the website,
I was updating all of the records by hand,
literally by editing HTML files.
And so people would send me emails
with all of their new records.
And then I would go and manually insert them.
When I was 15 years old, it was a big part of who I was.
- If you achieve a good time,
you can go online and say, hey, I did this.
And the people who also share that same passion
can give you some attention and respect.
- All these teenagers came together in the late nineties,
early 2000s, and became lifelong friends.
- When you get a really good new untied world record
that no one's ever had before,
it almost feels like exploring new lands.
- [Wes McKinney] You would finish the level
and there would be, like your heart would skip two beats,
and then you would press A and you'd be like,
you know, did I get it? And be like just... you know.
- You're the only person in the world
to see those numbers
on the end screen of the game.
You know, you're it.
- There's this sort of psychological catnip
that led to this addictive, kind of obsessive,
cycle with the game.
- There are very few things that beat that rush still today.
I can say that.
- What would lead a person to play
the same stage a thousand times in a row?
- You see a lot of guys who maybe, you know,
they're not at the best place in their life at the time.
Maybe they've just lost a job
or gotten out of a relationship or, you know,
maybe they're a bit downtrodden.
Speed running can be a natural kind of place of comfort
to give them a sense of direction and focus to carry on.
- [Narrator] Fresh off the success of GoldenEye
and deep into production of Perfect Dark,
the unthinkable happened.
Several key members of the team,
Hilton, Norgate, Doak, and Ellis, left the company,
setting off to form a new studio, Free Radical Design.
- [Steve Ellis] So we started off with myself, Dave Doak,
Karl Hilton, Graeme Norgate, and Lee Ray,
who all left Rare roughly at the same time.
And we started in April, '99.
- [Karl Hilton] It was a hugely difficult decision.
In some respects, I mean, on the one hand,
I think we were all ready to go and do Free Radical.
And we were all very excited by the idea of Free Radical.
And we all knew we were young and confident
enough that we thought, oh, it's going to be,
yeah, we'll do this. It'll be a great success.
We'll be fine, you know.
- It was a thing that I was thinking about for a while.
After GoldenEye...
I don't know. I mean, we were young and naive
and we kind of felt like we'd done it
all ourselves, which in retrospect,
I now realize that there will have been things
going on behind the scenes that we were unaware of
that allowed us to have the time
that we had to make that game good.
- [Narrator] With their stock high,
they signed an exclusive deal with publisher Eidos
to develop a game for a new console,
the Sony PlayStation 2.
The new game would be Time Splitters.
But could it live up to the standard
they'd set with GoldenEye?
- [Karl Hilton] PlayStation 2 was around the corner.
So as soon as Eidos had signed us up, you know,
then it was straight to Sony.
Look, we're going to make another game.
It's going to be a multiplayer.
I think your console is clearly going to be a great console
to do it on, and then Sony was super supportive,
and yes, suddenly we had dev kits in our office.
- [Peer Schnieder] We were all super excited about
Free Radical and then after we played Time Splitters,
we really liked what we saw.
- We were the only European-developed launch title,
you know, so that was a very quick sort of,
here's a fun game, not much to it,
but it's got all these bits and pieces
and have a bit of fun with it.
- When we made the Time Splitters' games with Free Radical,
it was kind of like, we want a chocolate box,
we want to do everything. So those games were that.
The original Time Splitters was a multiplayer game,
just let's throw everything and see what sticks.
- I think a lot of fans went to Time Splitters and said,
oh my God, this brings back all the memories
from GoldenEye and the way it feels,
but what Free Radical did with that game
is just speed it up.
- It was all about immediacy and accessibility.
Pick up and play.
You should just be able to start playing,
choose a bunch of settings that you fancy
at that time and have fun straightaway.
- There was no great design document for Time Splitters
at the start that said,
this is the game and this is how it's going to work
and this is what things you're going to do.
- It just had such a nice feel to it.
And you could pick it up and play it
without a whole lot of learning for it as well,
which means you can get people who aren't so
big a gamers in on it, and you could actually
have your four player split-screen
and everybody's having fun.
- It wasn't representative of what we were capable of.
It was representative of what we had enough time to do.
So Time Splitters 2 was where
we wanted to show what we could do.
- Time Splitters 2 was obviously our chance to do it properly.
And we had more time and the first one had been successful.
So Eidos were happy for us to spend
a bit more money and a bit more time
making a more detailed one with a proper story,
and then a bit more character development in it.
- And they were quite hands-off.
That's a thing that was also true of GoldenEye.
I think that's the thing that makes a big difference
to the end result of a project.
- [Narrator] The Time Splitters series
would go on to be one of the most successful
franchises on the PlayStation 2,
selling over 3.5 million copies on the system
and earning a dedicated and passionate fan base.
Throughout the mid-2000s, Free Radical Design
would go on to create titles like Second Sight
for the PS2 and Haze for the PS3.
- [Steve Ellis] After we finished Time Splitters,
Lucas Arts approached us and said
they'd like us to make a Star Wars game.
- It was a hugely fun thing to be working on.
Obviously the team was stoked because
we got access to all of the great
resources and history of Star Wars.
- [David Doak] I can remember it just being an
absolute joy to go to work.
We were making what we wanted to make.
We personally felt vested in it because we owned
the business and we were creating our thing.
- [Narrator] Back at Rare, change was in the air.
The Nintendo deal had reached its end
and Rare needed a new partner.
Companies like Activision and Microsoft were circling.
And for the successful bidder,
the spoils would be Rare's reputation
and its passionate fan base.
For Rare, it was an opportunity to secure
the long-term viability of the company,
but it wouldn't be without risk.
The Rare faithful would have to hold their breath
as giant corporations moved in.
- [Simon Parkin] Owners of the company and the founders,
Chris and Tim stamper, put the company up for sale.
And they're looking to find a buyer.
Microsoft's interested, Activision's interested
and Nintendo is interested.
And I think a lot of the staff were like, well, you know,
hopefully we'll be acquired fully by Nintendo,
but Nintendo's CEO at the time gives them a valuation
that's way, way lower than what they're after.
And Activision puts in a big bid.
So it looks for a moment that they're going to go
with Activision, and then for one reason or another,
that deal falls through.
(Conker yelling)
- [James Batchelor] When Microsoft bought Rare in 2002,
I believe it was, I think they lost a little bit.
I think some people at Rare would kind of agree with that.
Case in point, that's when you started
to see people leave Rare and form Free Radical.
Microsoft wanted to really push Kinect
and really want to push this kind of hands-free control thing.
But you had Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventure,
all these kinds of games that people
just didn't feel were Rare.
You didn't feel that Rare quality about it
because they were mini game collections
and that's not really what Rare did. Rare built worlds.
- I left Rare because I became less enamoured
with it as time went, after Tim and Chris left,
that was it for me. I liked them being there.
When they left, I don't think I left long after that.
I didn't want to be there really anymore.
- [Steve Ellis] For a long time we described that as
the best publisher relationship we'd ever had,
it was working really, really well.
It was going so well that not long after that,
they asked us to also start working
on the sequel at the same time.
In order to do that, we had to grow the company.
- [David Doak] As it got bigger and bigger,
more time was kind of spent on dealing
with the frictions that you have,
particularly with publishers.
- It was two and a half years,
but I mean the amount of money
in at that point would have been eight figures.
The funding model then was publisher advances.
And if you have a good publisher relationship,
then you're safe,
but that relationship has always got some conflict in it.
It got to the point where we were doing milestones
every month and sending them off.
And if the publisher didn't like what they saw,
we wouldn't get paid, and our burn rate was astronomical.
So, you know, it doesn't take much
for the wheels to come off.
- Unfortunately, you know, the story was
not a great one obviously, you know, the studio
running into trouble with Battlefront development.
- That becomes quite difficult
if that goes on for more than a few months,
because everyone needs to get paid.
- When it came to the end of the year,
we had to put the company into administration.
- That was gutting, you know.
- In almost every publisher we worked with,
there was some degree of conflict
and that took us down in the end.
(somber music)
- Today is a culmination of about three years of planning.
We're filming an actual real film
called Bringing Back GoldenEye.
- I'm Dan Guest, I'm the director
of Bringing Back GoldenEye,
the mockumentary written by Jim Miskell,
all about the GoldenEye world championships.
- [Jim Miskell] It was the first thing I'd ever been good at,
never mind a game, and I was amazing at it.
So I've written two films about GoldenEye.
Obviously, this is the second one.
First was Going For GoldenEye.
I made it myself, basically wrote it,
directed it, produced it, made the costumes, edited it.
I made everything apart from hold the camera,
hold the boom, and act in it basically.
And I'd never do that ever again. It was very stressful.
Grant Kirkhope said it was the film of the year,
which, you know, what more could you want, really?
David Doak compared it to Spinal Tap, King of Kong.
I'm really happy that the Rare guys liked it.
I'm really, really proud of it just because I did it,
you know, end of the day,
a lot of people can say they're going to do stuff,
but I'll put my money where my mouth is.
And I went through and did it.
And I saw it all the way through.
But now I've hired a lovely crew and producers
and everything and lots of lovely actors and,
yeah, they're making an awesome film.
- [Dan Guest] It's written by a massive fan.
Jim's just written a great story with
a lot of little inside jokes and obviously David Doak's involved.
And it's just a great nostalgia trip for fans of the game.
- What we're filming these next couple of days
is the world championships interior parts of the film.
There'll be a hundred extras in,
and we've got a stage full of
new competitors and characters.
So it's going to be a big day,
and David Doak from the GoldenEye team
is coming to present the trophy.
Which is just mind blowing
because I've shot that guy in the head
so many times in the facility!
(upbeat music)
I guess the legacy of GoldenEye is the fans.
You know, and what they do with those memories
and how they keep it alive.
I mean like, look what's going on here.
To me, I'm hopefully contributing to the legacy
of GoldenEye and people enjoy what I'm doing
because, you know, I think it's important
that we tell stories based on video games.
You know, we're the first couple
of generations where that's our entertainment.
And so I'm celebrating this game
that's a big part of my life.
- It's really interesting when you look
at the James Bond games that came after GoldenEye.
The Eurocom Bond games were pretty competent.
Some of the more vehicular-based,
like some of the other ones were trying to do some of
the stuff that GoldenEye did, but failed.
- [James Batchelor] GoldenEye's the one that people keep coming back to.
When in doubt, do a GoldenEye.
So EA did this with GoldenEye Rogue Agent.
You worked for the villains and there's kind
of almost like a mob war,
like you're working with the villains
as they kind of fight against each other.
And it was called GoldenEye because
he actually has a golden eye,
and Activision did the same thing after Quantum of Solace,
was basically a Call of Duty with a bit of a Bond skin.
They did the GoldenEye 007 re-imagining for Wii
to try and tap in that nostalgia
because that's the game that people remember.
That's the game that people love.
- [Ad Narrator] Who here would say that it's one of
the greatest shooters of all time?
- Everybody. - It set the standard.
- Problem is, as good as some of these games were,
none of them match GoldenEye.
- Nobody ever got close to kind of
bringing home that magic again.
- [Krishan Sharma] I think by calling it GoldenEye
and then releasing a game that
is not in beat or in tune with what made
GoldenEye so special, I think upset a lot of people.
I think a lot of people were expecting a one-to-one remake,
but that's not what they got.
(upbeat music)
(keyboard clicking)
The XBLA remake, for a lot of us,
we had heard rumblings about it.
- [Blaine Morehead] Sounds like it was almost at 100%,
like it sounds like it was pretty much ready to go.
- [Krishan Sharma] It was written about
absolutely by every major gaming publication
and it even actually did hit a couple
of mainstream press as well.
- [Journalist] Yes, I was there, I was part of the staff
when the news broke about a GoldenEye
release for the Xbox Live Arcade.
I think what made the Rare employee want to do it
was I don't think it had anything to do with anger,
I don't think it had anything to do with spite,
I think it was...
the intention was to get it out there
so that the world could see it.
- Just the way those leaks were released,
by almost like a double agent.
- It's such a shame that we never got
the GoldenEye HD remake that was rumored
for Xbox 360, I think it was.
So it was going to be a HD version of GoldenEye 64,
all the levels you remember, but with kind of
much more realistic graphics and online multiplayer,
and the problem is at the time, it was such a legal mess.
- We're talking, you know, three, four companies
that need to all see eye to eye
and get a proper piece of that pie.
- Microsoft owned Rare and Rare owned the game,
except GoldenEye 64 was published by Nintendo,
so Nintendo had the rights to that game
because Rare worked for them and was licensed.
It was all licensed by them,
except Activision at the time had the James Bond license.
Just became this massive,
you've got three companies arguing over
who does and doesn't have the rights to it.
And it meant that ultimately it never came out.
(keyboard clicking)
(upbeat music)
(ominous music)
- [Krishan Sharma] People who grew up on GoldenEye are now
trying to make the remake that they didn't get.
(upbeat music)
I mean, we had the Quake engine
and the Doom engine that we, you know,
and yet saw some impressive mods
that were being made from those engines.
But then Source engine came along.
- GoldenEye: Source is this project
that is totally fan made that is built
on the Source engine by Valve.
So the engine that ran Half-Life 2.
- GoldenEye: Source is a remake
of the multiplayer component of GoldenEye.
- [Blaine Morehead] They have essentially re-imagined
the GoldenEye levels to be remastered
to make it look more like the movie.
It's higher res textures, higher polygon count models.
All the weapons are redone, sound effects, and music even,
and all in the spirit of let's get our favorite
kind of couch death match game online
so that we can play it, you know,
with people from all over the world.
- [Krishan Sharma] So we didn't get the remake that we want.
We constantly hear these rumblings in the industry
about how there is a GoldenEye out there,
remake that is done. It's just not being released.
- [Simon Parkin] The inability for the corporations to
figure out a way to get a remastered version of GoldenEye
out has created a vacuum
into which fans have fallen
and they're making their own projects.
You know, their sort of black label versions.
- [Curtis Higgins] I am Curtis Higgins.
I am co-creator of GoldenEye: Source.
GoldenEye: Source is a adaptation
of the original Nintendo 64 game. We started in 2004.
The team has touched all corners of the globe.
We currently have members from Canada, US,
Switzerland, UK, Spain, Australia, Brazil.
- Says something about the fondness that people
hold for this game that they would dedicate
so much of their time to recreating it,
you know, either for their own pleasure,
but also probably for younger generations.
- The cool thing about indie development
is you can either make something yourself
or get one or two or three or half a dozen
of your friends and build something with tools
that are free or cheap and widely available.
- You can learn how to 3D model
with free open source software now.
You can learn, you know, Unreal Engine, Unity,
these are free to play around with game engines.
- [Krishan Sharma] So now we have these tools,
these game development tools, that we never had before.
What's interesting to see is how these tools
are being utilized by people who grew up playing GoldenEye.
- [Blaine Morehead] And so that democratization of the tools
is kind of leveling this whole field
and making these projects possible.
- [Emily Elmund] In the end, it's just a group of people
who absolutely love the original game
and they just want to bring an updated,
modern version to people who love it.
- No other game that you play,
where you're playing Call of Duty or another game,
and you're like, oh, I really hate the way this happens,
all of a sudden a developer or somebody pops up and goes,
oh, I'll change that next week.
Next thing you know, all the problems
you had with the game are now fixed.
- [Tristan Ogilvie] Those teams that are kind of off the leash
and can do what they want without fear of, you know,
failing any focus tests or anything like that.
- [Grant Kirkhope] Sometimes I feel like the corporatization
of it all has sucked a bit of the creativity out of it.
That's what I feel.
I like that kind of gamers making games for gamers model.
I kind of feel that's a great way to do it.
- We've had a few members, they reached out
to Dr. Doak on Twitter,
we arranged a session where we were able to play.
He came in, we played with him. He played with the team.
We were only expecting him to play for about an hour.
And he ended up staying for about five hours.
It was definitely a dream of mine to
show my work to an original developer.
Modding provides an outlet for your creativity.
It allows you to try and fail
and you just get to have fun.
- [Blaine Morehead] GoldenEye is still very alive
and well in the modding scene.
You know, when Elon Musk unveiled the cyber truck,
it was like a day or two after that
that someone modded the truck
into the streets level and even had, you know,
a low poly Elon Musk in there that
actually spoke to the character in the game.
It's like, it's just so wonderful that
that kind of stuff is out there.
- [Donnie York] The GoldenEye modding scene
has really exploded with so many different custom levels.
There's new sounds, there's new characters,
there's new weapons, there's new music.
- One of the things I really love
about GoldenEye 007 is that there's still
this community around the world.
They're making mods for the game.
- What people can do nowadays is practically endless.
It's constantly evolving.
What you see one year, the next year will be even greater.
There's mods where people have
completely changed the style of the game,
the timeframe, the genre,
and making world war type games
where you might still be Bond,
but you're taking on Nazis
and you're going through old hangars and streets,
and you're using these classic weapons
that sound extremely realistic and accurate
to the original representation,
but then there's other ones that base themselves
on something completely different.
- Everything in the game, from wall textures
to weapons, to characters, to items,
has been changed.
- It still has the same physics and controls and engine,
but it takes on a whole new life.
- These projects are just amazing efforts.
And it's all in these small modding
communities where they crop up.
- [Daniel Scales] It's a very close knit community
and that's awesome. A lot of people willing to share
and promote other people's projects
and keen to see other people in industry
and other developers' projects do really well.
- [Donnie York] We were all helping each other.
Anybody would come up with an idea
and if they didn't have the thought process
of how to possibly do it,
they might pass it on to somebody else
who is more experienced and they can try it out
and they have different opinions of their own.
And we were all just kind of banking off
each other to come up with as many cool
new discoveries as we could.
And it just really blew the game apart.
- When you want to talk about the future of gaming
and the company or group of people
who are going to move the needle
or take the next evolutionary step,
it probably won't be AAA.
- I think innovation has now moved from AAA
to the indie scene because the indie scene
is basically what Rare was back in the nineties.
It's small teams, pretty inexperienced,
doing it out of the love for making
something that they want to make.
- [Narrator] In 2012, following the lackluster 007 Legends,
Activision abandoned the Bond license.
James Bond would be absent from video game
store shelves for nearly 10 years,
and discovering the magic formula
of GoldenEye's success remains elusive to this day.
- [Peer Schnieder] Nobody ever got close to
kind of bringing home that magic again.
And that's, you know, because maybe it was,
everybody tried to take what GoldenEye
had created and tried to replicate it.
And so it kind of felt like more up-to-date,
but kind of cheaper copies of GoldenEye.
What we didn't see was a lot of innovation
in the newer Bond games that really
kind of maybe also adapted with what James Bond
was becoming in the Pierce Brosnan era.
- [Steve Ellis] I often say, you know,
when I'm explaining to newcomers to the industry,
that I think a lot of great games
are not necessarily the result of a great person in charge
or a great team making the game,
but they kind of reflect a great environment
that allows them the flexibility to experiment.
- It was about eight people.
In my experience, later in the games industry
was once you get to teams which are bigger
than say the size of a sports team,
that network of interpersonal connections gets fuzzier.
And also you end up with a hierarchy
because you have to have some kind of production hierarchy.
So people don't feel that empowered.
Somebody, anyone on the team could have an idea
and within an hour we could all have discussed it.
So we were very agile.
- You definitely feel the presence
of corporations a lot more.
A lot of the most prominent UK developers
are owned by massive publishers
or have been owned and shut down by massive publishers.
Rare is owned by Microsoft, and all right,
they're allowed to do their own thing,
but they are very much doing
their own thing on Microsoft's payroll.
- Things have become a little bit more corporate and safe.
Generally, I think that's true of all game development.
Some of the risks that are taken in GoldenEye
just wouldn't fly in this day and age.
Going back to that inexperienced team,
small team, you know, movie license,
even the freedom that they had with the license
these days wouldn't happen, you know,
to be able to kind of include stuff
from previous Bond films, you know, characters,
to actually go on the movie set,
photograph everything, going back to that
and the idea of perfect storm,
everything kind of just aligned to create
this wonderful experience.
- The size of their team in many respects was a strength.
You know, they didn't have the problem
of having sort of too many shifts.
They didn't really have the problem of too many layers
of management that a lot of AAA games have these days.
And they didn't really have anyone
telling them what they should do, or more importantly,
they didn't really have anyone telling them
what they couldn't do, but they just did everything.
And they just found a way.
(somber music)
- Everything that I've done since, obviously,
comes from the fact that Martin Hollis
walked into my room that morning and I said yes.
And I shudder when I think about
what would have happened if I had gone, eh. You know!
- When people are successful,
they're generally successful because they worked hard
and they have ability, but they've always been lucky.
You know, that's the thing that they don't tell you.
- If you didn't have any one of us
on the actual team, you wouldn't have got the same game.
- It was a great project to work on.
'Cause it was a small close knit team
who were working with a great license.
It's a once in a lifetime opportunity.
We had enormous fun.
- It was the right people at the right time.
It really was. The fact we all loved Bond, I loved Bond,
we all just loved Bond, you know, so
you just put the extra effort in, didn't you?
- People keep coming up to me and telling me
I've changed their childhood
or taken their childhood.
- It's surreal that after all this time
it's still a thing that we're talking about.
It was the first thing that I did after leaving uni.
It was literally more than half of my life ago.
And here we are talking about it.
- Over 23 years in or something
and people will still remember it fondly
and have questions about it.
- Although it frustrates the hell out of me
that that's the only thing people remember you for, you know,
it's still nice that you've done that thing
and people go, that was my game.
- GoldenEye in one word for me, is fun.
Simple as that, because
it was just fun to play from start to finish.
- Bond. It's just so very, very Bond.
- One word.
Evolutionary.
In terms of video games,
and me. It evolved me.
It changed me. It changed exactly who I am now.
It's...
No other video game will get the chance to do that again.
- There was something very special, that...
some kind of spark, some kind of life that GoldenEye had
that these other Bond games didn't quite get,
as close as they came.
- Even 20 years later, there's a certain,
you know, je ne sais quoi about it, but...
Yeah, if somebody has a better answer,
I'd be very interested in that.
- I'm so glad that I am my age now
because I don't want to sound patronizing or condescending,
but if you've got a multiplayer game,
just go round your friend's house and play it.
Don't play it online. Don't. I sound really old.
But just sit next to 'em on a couch
with two other people or five people,
six people, and just enjoy the game,
as well as your...
your bodies being next to each other.
- You hear all these stories about how people
have met and Dave was halfway across the world
and because of our mutual love of a game,
we happened to meet, and that's insane.
- GoldenEye: Source became this big thing,
and then that brought us together
now that we're young adults
and now we're married
and have a house because of that game.
- To think that if we'd never met in that game,
we'd never have met in person.
It just keeps coming back
into our lives in some kind of degree.
- It grabbed people.
I've seen people come and go,
and they come back and they come back
and they come back because they can't stay away from it.
They might go away from it for a couple years,
but something about it always pulls them back in.
- In the office at IGN, every day,
we would boot up GoldenEye at the end of the day,
and then people would forget to go home.
It's lovely that people still loved it.
It's lovely that we had such an effect,
that people clearly enjoyed playing it so much.
You know, you don't think about that when you're making it,
we were having fun playing it. We knew we liked it.
And you hope that other people will like it.
- It's just this entire era for me
of just having fun with a game that you bought
and there wasn't anything else to buy for it.
No microtransactions, no expansions,
everybody had the same game.
You just had to sit in front of the console,
pick up a controller, and away you go.
- I mean, some people stormed out the house
like almost in tears that they lost GoldenEye matches.
You know what I mean? Because they were like, yeah,
I'm the best at GoldenEye.
Come round Will's on Saturday and see what happens.
You got destroyed, didn't you?
Yeah, and they just walk away,
and you're like, see you next week?
Yeah. See you...
- [Overlapping presenters] We've been talking about this game for so long.
A game from the olden times.
...most beloved licensed video games ever made.
GoldenEye 007 for Xbox Live...
- [Narrator] In early 2021, something remarkable happened.
The shelved GoldenEye remake leaked onto the internet.
After being locked away for over a decade,
a full play through of the much anticipated remake
was streamed online by the world's most prominent
GoldenEye streamer, Graslu00.
Almost a quarter of a century after its release,
players all around the world came together
once again to reconnect over their favorite game.
Global news outlets beamed fresh GoldenEye news
into living rooms as the rights holders
could only watch on as the sales
the remake might've made vanished.
Deep into the 21st century,
nearly 25 years after its original release,
the impact is undeniable.
Rare's GoldenEye 007 lives on.
(upbeat music)
# No time to waste, feel the silvery shake #
# You got the guts to try #
# To be the best, better or play the rest #
# You know it, to be the Golden Child #
# You better shoot straight, there ain't no debate #
# It takes a steely eye #
# Flick of the wrist, guess a hit or miss #
# Or then it's somebody's time to die #
# GoldenEye #
# It's gonna get you #
# GoldenEye #
# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #
# GoldenEye #
# So take the pain and realise #
# GoldenEye #
# There's no escape from GoldenEye #
# Can't keep your nerve, you'll get all you deserve #
# If you can hold the line #
# She lacks a will, bring a thrill of the kill #
# That'll keep you pumped up, adrenalised #
# This ain't no game #
# Don't be fooled by the name, no, no, no #
# This is a way of life #
# So strap on in, it's about to begin #
# The victor will run the golden mile #
# Run the golden mile #
# GoldenEye #
# It's gonna get you #
# GoldenEye #
# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #
# GoldenEye #
# So take the pain and realise #
# GoldenEye #
# There's no escape from GoldenEye #
# GoldenEye #
# It's gonna get you #
# GoldenEye #
# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #
# GoldenEye #
# Take the pain and realise #
# GoldenEye #
# There's no escape, there's no escape #
# GoldenEye #
# It's gonna get you #
# GoldenEye #
# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #
# GoldenEye #
# Take the pain and realise #
# GoldenEye #
# There's no escape from GoldenEye #