The Multiplayer Mode Was Made In A Month? 12 Killer Facts About The N64 Classic ‘GoldenEye 007’

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Don’t let his brooding in the recent Daniel Craig movies fool you; James Bond lives a charmed life. Hell, he’s even had good luck with video games. There have been a surprising number of good Bond games over the years, but Nintendo and Rare’s GoldenEye 007 stands alone as a groundbreaking achievement. GoldenEye proved that first-person shooters could work on consoles, licensed games could be true top-of-the-line experiences, and that sitting around the basement with your buddies racking up headshots was pretty much the ultimate way to waste a Saturday afternoon.

Of course, like a lot of cutting-edge games, GoldenEye weathered a rocky development, and as a result, the end product bears a lot of interesting quirks. Here’s a few GoldenEye 007 facts licensed to blow your mind…

GoldenEye 007 was developed by only nine people, eight of which had never worked on a game before.

Martin Hollis, the golden mind behind GoldenEye 007.

Given the depth and complexity of GoldenEye 007, you might surmise that the game was a major priority for Nintendo and the game’s developer Rare, but you’d be wrong. Development of the game began in late 1994, based on a pitch by a mid-level programmer named Martin Hollis (above) who had just finished up working on Killer Instinct, his first game with the company. Rare and Nintendo liked Hollis’ pitch enough to greenlight the game, but they weren’t overly enthusiastic, so they gave Hollis a skeleton crew of rookies. Hollis, with his impressive single game credit, was the only guy on the nine-person crew with any actual hands-on experience. In a strange way, though, that naivety actually helped the game according to GoldenEye team member Graeme Norgate.

itty53 on August 13rd, 2019 at 18:52 UTC »

Bonus TIL: The reason Goldeneye 64 was so wildly popular was clearly the introduction of multiplayer. And multiplayer wasn't even in the original plans. It was one guy on the dev team who figured "why not, right? the assets are all there, it's just a little more programming". So he, the one guy, put it together. And the publisher basically said "Yeah, sure, throw it in there".

The thing that made that game a legend was a complete one-off afterthought.

_bieber_hole_69 on August 13rd, 2019 at 18:47 UTC »

Here's another one: Roller Coaster Tycoon was made by only one guy in his house, Chris Sawyer

ricopotamus on August 13rd, 2019 at 18:17 UTC »

I would love to see this remastered.