Goldeneye 007 for the N64 is rightly hailed as the most influential console FPS of the Nineties, but the game we got could have been very different if it wasn’t for Nintendo’s resident genius Shigeru Miyamoto, according to developer Rare. Martin Hollis, director of Goldeneye 007, revealed to the audience at GameCity festival in Nottingham that the original iteration of the game was much more violent, featuring graphic blood spurts, until a certain influential someone suggested that the developers tone it down.
“Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge,” Hollis said. “For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”
A fax from Miyamoto confirmed Hollis’ fears. “One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible,” he revealed. “I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”
As a compromise, Rare listed characters in a film-esque credit sequence to highlight the unreality of the game. “It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice,” Hollis explained. “The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”
Hollis also divulged that we missed out on a Rare-produced sequel to Goldeneye after the studio turned it down in favour of its own intellectual property, later creating Goldeneye’s spiritual sequel Perfect Dark. “I thought about this and was not sure I’d really want to,” Hollis said. “We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No’. We sent the message back, ‘The answer is no. We don’t plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film’. And that was it.”
Image courtesy of Game On Daily.
