The Making of GoldenEye 007 (N64) | Documentary

in august 1997 a small team at uk developer rare released a game that would not only help to define the nintendo 64 but would reinvent an entire genre changing the face of first person shooters forever that game was goldeneye 007 in this video we'll hear from some of the developers behind its success and find out how the team came together how the concept evolved and what went into its creation i'm on a retro tip and this is the making of goldeneye [Music] rare itself was founded in 1985 by two brothers tim and chris stamper they had previously established another hugely successful company ultimate play the game which was a defining developer in the 8-bit computer years particularly for the zx spectrum rare was initially an offshoot of ultimate but when ultimate was sold to us gold in 1985 the stampers began releasing games as rare this was the start of a long-standing relationship with nintendo with them developing over 40 titles for the nes between 1986 and 1992 that's a lot of games but everything changed for rare in 1994 after investing in some state of the art and costly sgi or silicon graphics machines rare started to create 3d graphics using the hardware which could then be pre-rendered onto super nintendo carts their demo impressed nintendo so much that they bought a stake in rare a not insignificant 25 at the time and offered rare the chance to create a super nintendo game using this technology based on nintendo characters rare chose donkey kong and developed donkey kong country using this advanced hardware and techniques rare shot to the forefront of uk video game development and donkey kong country demonstrated an unprecedented quality of graphics on the console rare became a second party developer for nintendo and between donkey kong country and reyes purchased by microsoft in 2002 rare developed exclusively for nintendo consoles in the home many of which were also published by nintendo soon enough rest started developing for nintendo's upcoming console and with an eye to the future tomorrow begins today nintendo the world's leader in video games has joined forces with silicon graphics the world's leader in visual computing to introduce the most exhilarating breathtakingly realistic 3d video entertainment ever witnessed project reality initially codenamed project reality and later the ultra 64 the nintendo 64 would take the capabilities of the sti hardware to new heights several strictly segregated teams at rare would work on different games for the new console with one team working on a licensed game my name is bond james bond first let's meet the team who would be working on the bond game gold noise credits were tongue-in-cheek film style roles to complement the fact that it was a film tie-in so i'll explain both those and each team member's actual role on the game produced and directed by martin hollis martin headed the team so this credit is perhaps the most accurate martin studied computer science at cambridge director of photography mark edmonds who worked on the engine and underlying code mark had some programming experience although none in games martin and mark were the game's main programmers original screenplay by dr david doak david was responsible for the story and level structure and the gameplay mechanics in general dr doke is a real doctor having studied biochemistry at oxford and was a research scientist prior to joining rare scenic art director carl hilton cole designed many of the levels the weapons and the ui carl's background was in architecture production designer duncan botwood duncan built many of the levels and worked on the motion capture for the character animations he was also the motion capture actor for all of them costume designer brett jones often credited as b jones another very apt credit as brett designed all of the characters and also worked on the motion capture second unit director stephen ellis steve did some programming for the game famously being instrumental in creating the multiplayer mode last minute and for coding a fully functional zx spectrum emulator into the game original music by graham norgate who did all the sound effects and grant kirkhope graham and grant each composed roughly half of the game's soundtrack there are of course several other team members with more minor roles but this team of nine with a core team behind goldeneye yeah it's um i mean it was a very small team obviously i i came on board first martin hollis the team if god and i came along and said oh we might be doing a james bond game do you like james bond and and yeah i mean i love james bond so i said you know completely obviously yeah absolutely love death sponsoring all the movies no more all by heart so i turned the next day i was basically moved out into this other building where there was myself martin hollis and mark edmonds who were the two main programmers and that was it to start with that was the three of us i mean god and i was hard you know we spent took two and a half years to make and we worked unbelievably long hours so we were at the studio from eight in the morning until ten at night you know making this thing and you know in those days with the way rare was funded you know we were really left alone and we didn't do any designs before we made the game and the whole thing was made on the fly by us just going this would be cool and this will be cool and playing other games and going oh that's really fun we should do something like that and you know having that ability hadn't been given the freedom and the time to just experiment and play around with stuff there were so many talented people there and you got to see what was going on and we would have that freedom to create because nintendo backed the studio so well so there wasn't this sort of pressure i mean it was a pressure to deliver but not pressure to deliver to a budget to a time scale it was like make the game good first and foremost well i can tell you why we did end up with those titles was because rare at the time didn't want to put credits on at all it was just going to say by rare limited but martin hollis fought for it and the way we got around it was to become film creditors if you like and the closest thing to what i was doing was costume designer because i was building all of the characters and putting them in costumes so when it came down to it i built all of the characters uh did all of the animation all of the elements most of the animation clean up two of the backgrounds and sorted out the sort of look of the front uh interface just went to uh to the goldeneye block one evening just to see what they'd been up to barton was showing me sort of flying around the levels that they had sort of the early stages of what they had there's no gameplay or anything at that point it was just a just a fly through i mentioned how how much fun it would be to work on it and how much it would mean to me to do it and i worked with martin on killer instinct so he knew what was capable of i suppose and yeah so that's where that started still really early days i mean it was we didn't have any hardware or anything like that no no one really knew what the final specs were going to be so there was a lot of just sort of you know fingering in the air and thinking well it's probably going to be able to do this and do that so was a case of just writing some music and hoping that it would work in the you know when we actually got the hardware in the end and stuff like that what's interesting about the team is that they were very inexperienced in fact of the nine core members only four had worked on a game before and only one as a major role martin hollis had worked on killer instinct graeme norgate had done music for killer instinct and for donkey kong land on the game boy grant kirkhope worked on donkey kong land too carl hilton did some art for killer instinct but other than that the team were all video game virgins several were artists or musicians who knew nothing about making games carl was an architect and david doke had come on as system administrator for the silicon graphics hardware the whole thing about goldman same before apart from green law game everybody else hadn't made a game so no one knew what they were doing it was all just like you know suck it and see you know so we're able to add a go with it and sometimes that's why the best games are made because you don't know what the boundaries are you just go with your gut right and i think that's why rare was so great rare over this gut so many times the latter part of my degree and my phd was working on protein structure determination there's a computational side to that so i got involved in that and then particularly to look at these 3d models in those days it was big expensive fairly specialized machines and silicon graphics were one of the manufacturers of those machines as a kind of byproduct of what i was doing i i did a lot of system administration for these silicon graphics machines and i got back in the following games again and edge was one of the magazines that everyone who kind of was it was like the nerds face magazine really back and back and back in those things and then they were always advertising at rare because they were expanding their teams to do the n64 stuff and then there was an advert which was for you know programmers artists and we need a system administrator for our silicon graphics network so i i applied for it uh not really expecting anything to come off it was interviewed by martin hollis and mark betteridge um mark was one of the directors of rare and martin was leader of the gold medal and they offered me the job and as i got to know them later you know they were saying well you know i was the only choice you know they they didn't have anyone else who had the same experience with the move to the 3d stuff there was you know there was a there was a general feeling that they needed to i mean certainly on the engineering side they needed to get people who had more formal c c programming kind of um learning and stuff and then you know and there was a core of the mathematical stuff because the time the engines were writing the engine and doing all of the maths for that we see it it's fairly basic kind of vector masks and stuff but it's it you know it was it was slightly specialized at the time so you know martin and mark edmunds were both you know comp sci guys from cambridge b and carl had done you know what what was probably almost like the first wave of computer graphics degrees you know because that was that was an incredibly new field it was an insane hot house of talent rare at that time goldeneye was my first job yeah i mean i'd never worked in computer graphics or anything like that at all so coming into rare was completely different i mean i had to learn the new software which was alias wavefront at the time version 4 which i had to learn from scratch from a book and from a set of video tapes and i had three months in a room on my own learning how to do everything martin came into the office one day and said okay you're on this team and that's literally how it started i mean it was the dumbest of lux and what i took along was my all my architecture drawings and you know these the animations that i've done but also lots of architecture stuff and i was also i'm into photography so i've done all the photography so they offered me a job as an environment artist because i clearly understood buildings and light you know i mean after after the initial kind of wow i'm here i i i got quite frustrated with it because i enjoyed games i talked with everyone about games but i wasn't making games i was the guy who came and crawled around under your desk or you know fixed your monitor or did this whatever i was gonna i was gonna quit and martin hollis and simon farmer who was like kind of production manager there got wind of the fact yeah it was like well yeah you don't leave i said well you know it's been great but you know i'm not really enjoying it what would what what would make you stay and i said well yeah the worst thing is not being involved in the games and and martin said well maybe you could come and go all night so there was a kind of transition period where i was doing a bit actually doing better programming on golden eye not not not clever programming the safe the safe safe parts um and still doing system administration and but just gradually and then that programming turned into being more focused on getting the level design working and the in the single player game really i mean i i if there's a part of goldmine which is my part it is all the level set up in the single player game and and the ai scripting for that goldeneye was the first thing that i worked on but i mean so to start with the first month probably i i was just in the main farmhouse like in a little room upstairs and they like asked me to work on some graphics stuff just working on the pc like animating a character and creating skinned joints i mean i so i had no idea what it was going to be used for or or whatever so so i guess that was going okay and so then i moved over to the barn the goldeneye barn so it was just martin and carl were over there at the time so then yeah so i moved over to join them i guess the company trusted us just to get on with it so and that probably instilled trust in us or confidence in us the location was unassuming to say the least based out of twycross in leicestershire rare headquarters was remote a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere in the countryside there were different barns so there was like the main farmhouse there were there were different barns which different teams were in working on different games it really is in the middle of nowhere yeah there's there's nowhere around it and when we were at the farmhouse you know there were chickens running around all the time and there was two dogs so there was probably about 100 odd people there maybe i mean the thing is you just didn't see them quite honestly that was the thing you couldn't get into any of the other buildings and you didn't really interact with people that weren't on your team licensed games had a terrible reputation by the time that rare acquired the license and expectations were low the original concept was to create a side-scrolling platform game for the super nintendo martin hollis was keen to head up the project but only if the game could be developed for nintendo's new 64-bit console it was early 95. we just finished killer instinct yeah i can remember having a coffee with martin and he was talking about having been asked about this doing this game and i'm sure you know it was at that point it was going to be a super nintendo game so i'd imagine you know we'd be looking at a side scrolling beat him up or something you know and as as all film tie-ins were back in those days we weren't sure initially i mean we there was myself mark and martin and we were sort of talking about what we could do because obviously originally was supposed to be a super nes game and martin had only taken on the project on the condition that we could do it on the n64 because we knew ray knew that was coming um we've been told by nintendo that was on its way and we said well we don't want to do a snazz game we want to do you know the stairs at the new super nintendo again because budget is it was cool at the time because we knew it was going to be 3d and we thought well 3d is much more interesting um so we were looking at 3d i mean initially we were talking about things like if you remember the original gta games which was sort of they were sort of pseudo 3d downward camera paste the camera because it was kind of like spy hunter as well so we're thinking well you could do you know car chases and guns it could be a sort of cross between gta 3 and spy hunter the game then evolved to an on-rail shooter we were going to the local town and playing there was a sega arcade there and we were playing a lot of virtual cop and we thought actually a virtual cop would be great and we were playing a lot of doom as well and we thought the first person shooter is fun but we didn't know what the console could do we assumed it wasn't going to be that powerful so we figured maybe in on rails like virtual cop where you'd be you'd be taken around through the whole sort of movie on rails and you'd shoot the bad guys and you know and you could set everything up quite nicely so that was our initial second plan so i would do that um and we went down where i gave him some money and we went down and played the whole way through virtual cop from start to finish eventually it was decided that goldeneye would be a first person shooter a genre which at the time was still commonly known as doom clones once the console turned up the first version of the console turned up and we started martin and mark started playing with it they said actually i think we can take it off braille so we can actually make it like doom we can actually move you through it however you want to go so i the very first level i ever built was the underneath of the big dish at the end our though and that had been built with a track in line so that you you went through and followed this path through it so the first thing we did was turn that off and then i had to go back in and sort of start ripping stuff out to make it cheaper so that the whole thing actually could run i had a decent frame rate because i'd done some stuff that was really expensive but it didn't matter because the camera was only supposed to point in certain directions but suddenly it was like oh no you can turn and look anywhere you want this is going to be a free-roaming first person shooting game so there wasn't anything running at that stage at all um but it would have the plan for it was going to be an unreal shooter and then it just slowly evolved yeah because doom was on pc was like big at the time and we were all playing it so it just sort of moved towards that over time that was how first person games were evolving at that time you know how do you make it how do you make it not just about running around with red blue and yellow key cards and stuff i mean i you know i tremendous respect for doom the early dooms were transformative really there was nothing before them but there's not really the story as you kill monsters the james bond license is a complicated beast but it seems that rare had free reign to use not only almost anything from the film but almost anything from the entire bond franchise well as far as i was concerned i had complete and utter freedom i could do whatever i wanted this licensing deal also explains the addition of the two non-golden eye bond levels at the end of the game aztec and egyptian as they were free to use almost anything bond they designed these levels based on moonraker and live and let die they also incorporated elements from other bond films like scaramanga's golden gun the rights were for the whole of the bond franchise which is so which is why the multiplayer has stuff from other movies in it which is why we did you know some of the old you know the aztecs and from the moon rake and things like that because like yeah i wouldn't want to do that so it was great yeah you know it was like full access to the whole bond universe fantastic you know despite the broad license agreement some aspects were eventually cut from the game or toned down this is to be expected seeing as there were several parties to appease most notably mgm the bond license holders and nintendo themselves late in the day some people from mgm came to basically i think it was it was like a sign-off procedure and and they were just really surprised that we'd made a violent shooting game quite pleased with it but worried that it was overly violent so there were things that were cut some of the death animations were toned down and and then also they they completely beat out the other bonds as i understand it the sticking point would have been connory because conor's contracts would have predated any envisaging that it would go into a video game so there may have been some grey area there legally if conory ended up in a negotiation then moore and dalton would end up with a negotiation and you know it would be well what's he getting and jokingly said well you don't need this you know what why why are you just adding costs yeah yeah yeah i built uh roger moore sean connery and timothy dalton somewhere there is a cartridge with all full buttons in them somewhere later on we just obviously there's the famous thing about the four bonds we discovered we didn't have rights to all the bond because they were famous actors so we didn't have right to sean connery and and roger moore so they were in the game originally because we thought we did and then we were told no you've got to take those out we weren't allowed to use the eurocopter because that was owned by whoever builds the eurocopter so it got renamed to the euro chopper and uh the guy who played the cia agent jack wade kind of know that but we didn't have rights to his face either so he was in the game got taken out the only restriction that came in once was right at the end when we were doing the multiplayer levels and i built baron sandy and baron sambity has a cross around his neck and i had to take that off because you weren't allowed to religious symbols so he just has a sort of like pill shape and that's the only thing i was ever asked to change because it was you know religious religious symbols i think the only other thing was we didn't have female moon raker guards or i think because i think i built them but they didn't want to shoot women generally speaking unless they were in the game you know they just didn't want random female characters getting shot of course goldeneye on n64 wasn't released until august of 1997 almost two years after the release of the film in november 1995. for reference material the team got to visit the golden ice set several times i think it was the first day that i was in the new building and martin came in and he had a copy of the script which had all these stamps on it to show where it was gone because obviously it was still in being being filmed so that was top secret it was like you know you must look after this so i was allowed to read through the script and he came in holding a 35 mil camera and he said uh you know do you know about cameras i said yeah i do photography quite a lot so he said oh great so we're going to go down to the studio tomorrow you can use you can take the camera and take all the photos so you know basically spent the day being chaperoned by one of the producers around this sort of all the different sets um and we got you know got to go back obviously behind everything and take photos of all of the sets that they weren't using at the time and props and the costumes and things like that and you know at that point we had spent absolutely no time on any kind of production so we had no idea what we wanted so i just basically took photographs of absolutely everything and this was obviously 35 mil film so you know roles involves a film with me and i was photographing anything and everything you know we don't know what we're going to make yet but you better make sure we've got everything we can find and they you know they gave us blueprints for the sets as well so we could see the layouts of things like the archives and stuff so it's like okay this is how this set is being built and this is what it's going to look like and also obviously they were building sets and then tearing them down the first time we went there they were still building out on the main runway because it's an old helicopter factory originally rolls royce leaves them with it um and it was the first time it had been used i think for filming the chat the rolls-royce factory had shut down and was being turned into a studio that first time we went they were still building all this in petersburg streets so you know once that was built we came back and and took all those photos for the petersburg stuff because half of that was filmed in saint petersburg and the other half was filmed in leaves on the runway we saw the russians and petersburg sets you know where the tank goes around and uh we also saw the snow set that you see the plane take off right at the beginning we saw the um set where you know the interior of the archangels control room i think that's about it oh we went into the costume department as well and we saw some of the costumes on the rails and stuff at the time we had a digital camera and i must say this is what 1994 digital cameras doesn't exist and this digital camera was it was huge it was like a brick it was just this massive slr as a keem photographer i knew how to use an slr camera so i took a lot of the photographs oh and statue park we went round as well yes we had tons of photographs from statue park and also of some petersburg uh not so much in the costume department because it was literally just a walk through and all the costumes were hanging up anyway so it wasn't really something we could take photos of a lot of the reference material came from an unlikely and rather fortuitous source the personal bond collection of b jones don't forget at this point there was no internet there is what stuff have i got in my collection that i have front and side faces of my collection of james bond memorabilia which is extensive i literally looked through it for all the best photo references i mean all the pictures of the james bonds in all the um uh folders they're all from my james bond collection you know they're just photographs and scanned in from there there's magazines you know the making of goldeneye and gold as many golden eye reference books as i could find which i which i still have and i've still got little bits of paper in them to show where we took information from them the film was released in late 95 so one would assume that this was a great asset to the team in terms of design reference but maybe not we went to lots and lots of very early showings of it to sort of see what it was like but it was weird because we'd been in that view for about over a year so when you see something like james bond escaping through the catacombs right at the beginning it was like being in the film because we've been doing that so much and it was like oh what's the wall like what's the floor like you know we were literally in the premiere looking at the textures and seeing what was going on because that was our reference points so yeah we didn't ever get a videotape of it so there's no sort of taking things from a video as mentioned earlier rare were using the expensive silicon graphics hardware to produce goldeneye's artwork in 1995 the sti onyx began being used to develop for the nintendo 64. these units cost hundreds of thousands we all had either um quite high-end machines i had i had the big one because i was doing a lot of 3d modeling so i had an rx2 reality engine which was the size of a small fridge and sat beneath my desk yeah i really loved i mean amazing machines at the time i was just staggered by this machine i took pictures of it sent to all my friends saying look what i'm using you know i've got an onyx 2 reality engine which had some amazing games in the evenings we'd sit and play they had network games on it there was a flight simulator where you could do dog fighting or 3d which i've never seen before there was a brilliant tank game we had emulators that were supposed to emulate the n64 on these machines obviously when the console actually turned up it didn't have anywhere near as much memory or stuff like because they never do so you know the game that was running on those machines had to be significantly sort of particularly the graphics where the textures and stuff will cut back down and scale back down but um it wasn't bad i mean it looked good at the time you don't know it's three you don't know it's new technology you just know that that's the job you're in and this is the software they're using so you better learn it because you're going to be using it so it it's not really that kind of thought it's like okay i better learn this because i want to stay here for my job the nintendo 64 hardware as well as the cartridge-based media also brought with it challenges in a time when most consoles were transitioning to cd and see how it feels n64 [Music] a lot of it was just trying to make things actually fit on a nintendo 64 as well so you couldn't put in loads of polygons so just making sure that everything was cheap enough to run and even then it ended up running at quite a slow frame rate compared to modern games so one one thing was which martin hollis was working on so he worked on a virtual memory system from nintendo 64. but i guess it runs similarly to virtual memory on a pc now and it was basically some parts of the game code would swap in and out of the memory depending on what was running at that time and so he did that system just to um save memory so it could be used on other things yeah so maybe the uh intro sequence to the game so that would load in at the start and it would probably unload later on when you're actually in a level so there are certain techniques that you can use programming so you pre-act basically reallocate chunks of memory which can be used for various things there would be a chunk of memory allocated for the player's weapon you'd have to better load any graphics for any weapon into that same fixed sized chunk of memory so yeah so it's basically large enough to load in whatever was the most expensive weapon whenever the camera switched to an external perspective to the third person then instead of loading the weapon into that memory it would load the graphics for the the player character for james bond into that memory um yeah so that's like another little trick because you yeah so you'd either be displaying the first person weapon or you'd be displaying the third-person view of james bond oh yes another trick was so basically using like a scripting system for the ais for the enemies which was uh a lot cheaper than doing it in c code itself so it's basically just like a list of instructions like byte data yeah so it's just like a very simple programming language but it was it took up less memory you could specify different sizes of cartridges but they cost obviously the memory cost so if you said if you set a nintendo world we think it's going to be this big then they say well that will require this size cartridge and it'll cost this much which means from a rare point of view they were going to get royalties but obviously the cost of the cartridges came out the royalties so it's like so there's a lot of pressure for us to get the game onto the smallest cartridge possible you know um but i think we ended up i'm pretty sure we ended up using the biggest one that was available the team had to start from scratch with martin and mark writing tools that would translate everything to the nintendo 64. there's just a ton of hidden stuff going on in the in the coach kind of of all games people just don't realize so yeah so the the golden eye it was was pretty much nothing so the artists were using alias which became mayor so there were some tools for the artists but there wasn't a pipeline for how to get the graphics and display them on the console yeah so i did a lot of that basically converting graphics converting animations into a format so they could actually be used on the console but then there were no like level editors for setting up enemies on a level so we just clutched together some makeshift system so using it there was a there's a program called multi-gen so nintendo had their own version called ninja but so so we were using that to set up the levels position things on the levels and if any of the designers or artists remember this they'll probably just have nightmares because it was just such a horrible system compared to like all the modern so compared to things like unreal engine or unity i mean they just make the whole process seamless now and just light years ahead of what we were working with at the time i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure when we started on the nintendo 64 there wasn't even a proper debugger for the code so the only way to debug things was to display text on the screen saying where you were in the code things like that yeah so the only way for us to test things in the game so it was running on uh development kits just to like test the graphics you'd have to run the game on your development console and then so you'd be running around almost playing it um just to look around that level so it would have been quite a long time until we were then actually getting enemies in the game that were reacting to you yeah so it would have built up quite slowly to start with because we were just building everything from scratch just getting some graphics on screen first of all but the very basic thing would just be getting one triangle just displayed on the middle of the screen like rotating or something and then trying to get some graphics in that car had built and then being able to move around getting things like collisions happening so you could couldn't walk through walls yeah and then some ais at some point as well but awesome enemies that would react and try and shoot you and that you could shoot and so it just built up over quite a long time carl hilton and duncan botwood were responsible for designing and creating golden eyes levels contrary to most games the levels would be designed first based on the scenes and locations in the film so cole had a background as an architect yeah so i think martin basically said to him make some realistic levels so there was no there wasn't necessarily a big plan for what the level should be as far as i remember he was just making whatever he wanted you know in terms of what i built in terms of environments i've built most of the environments duncan block with a designer built some of the layouts initially and did some texturing and then handed it over to me later but other than that it was yeah it was me doing pretty much you know i allowed a few months for each environment and just powered through them all and then yeah we didn't have a 2d artist so if you look at goldeneye all of the 2d art the sort of ui stuff is all actually 3d models that have been rendered flat you know so um that was me doing all that and same with all the you know the icons with the bullets and stuff it was just me rendering little bullets in in alias and then flattening them out and and going in and hand editing to try and make them look a bit better i mean the resolution is super low so you had very little to work with so yeah it was um quite thrown together the same same with the the folders and the files you know that was a 3d model that i made the uh on her majesty's hss secret service crest is actually the crest of my passport that i scanned in which i don't think probably were allowed to do but it was you know making video games in those days was fun because it was such a small team and so you had to do a lot of different things yeah they weren't boxed out by some designer saying this is what happens in this level it was there is this environment in the film and some stuff happened in the film so there are some key rooms maybe or some key vistas that you see but generally it's just build that space for example the bunker in in the film you know there's that key room with all the consoles and stuff in it which we kind of don't really really have but you know there was a room with with it with a with a big monitor wall um but i think in the film it's got lots of desks and rows or something you know and i mean like the archives is another good example yeah so in that you know there's it's it's it's archives with bookshelves and stuff and it has a particular kind of soviet industrial look to it the carl just built built a building so you know so carl and you know brett and and eddie smith were just we're just building things duncan built the built the caverns there was an idea in that that there would be you would be pursuing trevelyan or something water caverns isn't in the in the film the idea was that the aretha dish was full of water and then it was drained so the water must have gone somewhere it's supposed to be a place where all this water can go and then the water level might come up but we it didn't get done we had all the blueprints so the first thing i would do is basically build what we knew was in the movie but obviously film sets are often quite simple they often just had one or two rooms in a corridor and that wasn't anywhere near enough for the game all the back walls and stuff that were missing because that's where the cameras and everything were i'd fill all that in and create a space and sort of just try and fill it out naturally how it would feel right and then i'd usually send it to dave doke the designer at that point or duncan the other designer and say this is what i've got so far what do you want to do here no you know performance was so difficult you know i had to try and work we couldn't have long corridors with lots of rooms opening off them because it wouldn't draw that so i was trying to work out how to make sure that the thing didn't look too expensive and that we weren't drawing too much and dave and duncan were trying to work out you know what you could do in each space that was interesting so i mean obviously we had the script so we knew what bond was going to be doing in fact halfway through the but the film came out so the first half of developing the game we knew what was going to happen because of the script in the second half we'd actually seen the movie so it was a lot of it was just like well let's recreate what happens in the movie but we need a bit more because the movie's only an hour and a half hour and 50 minutes long or whatever it is and we need you know 12 14 hours of gameplay so it was thought of okay well we know bond does this in the film now what else can we do around that that makes it more interesting and so you know that was when we started adding in extra rooms and doing extra bits on top of it some stuff because it wasn't really enough in the movie to make the full game we ended up inventing some new locations external stuff is hinted at the film but you don't get see or it was completely stuff where we just made stuff up like the missile silos you know so it was uh it was it was good fun you know and i think one of the reasons why it played well in the end was because we we were able to prototype those sorts of spaces very quickly and play them and then go yeah that doesn't really work let's change it you know and and try and get spaces that were interesting brett jones was solely responsible for designing the game's characters it was fortunate it's such low res information really because when we were coming to create the costumes again because there's no photoshop there's no drawing or painting any of this i had to model all of these things in a kind of two and a half d then take a render of them and then attach them to the characters so you know i made lots and lots of tuxedos and costumes and and that peculiar uh shirt that boris is wearing they're all created in two and a half dimensions you know it's like a a slightly curved object so you've got a bit of light coming on the front and then it would be put onto the polygonal character in this amazing three-point positioning system bottom left bottom right top right and that was it alias wavefront was our 3d modeling and animation package no photoshop so everything was created within that and then we used something called ninjen which was essentially this um texture placement package so we would import our models into that and then attach textures to it um i didn't really have much to do on that because with the characters i was told well you've got five textures of well no let's see now there was there was six textures on the hands there was five on the heads and then there was maybe four on the rest of the body uh so there would be a front and a back there wouldn't be anything about the sides at all ever and and and these were something like 28 by you know 24 by 48 pixels you know they were tiny little images just just put on the thing is ninja actually had a pixel editor so you could you could paint pixels and they were really big of course because you've only got a picture that's 24 by 48 so if something didn't match up you could pick up the pixel and just pick the right color and make it match it's just it's incredible isn't it and actually i chose all those extra four characters because i had all the reference and these were the people i had the best reference for i also wanted to get some female characters i wanted to get a black character in there and i wanted to get odd job in there because he was cool so yeah all of all the sort of stuff around our job is my fault because i chose him brett used photos of the staff at rare to map to the faces of characters in the game it was generally speaking anybody i could find i mean there's there's builders in there there's plumbers there's the staff from the canteen um there's the groundsman there's the it guy there's even a couple of the kids that were hanging around rare at time you know it was literally anybody and dr dyke famously appeared in facility as a double agent that dr doke objective it's you know it's it's a it's a dressed up door key objective really it could just be a key and believe obviously if it fits the fiction that you're meeting a double agent or something you know it's just a joke because that that facility is like we've got our lab stuff it's called the science center because i was a scientist so i think i put myself you know forced it to use my head because you could do that you could force a character to be a particular character when i did it it was entirely in the expectation that it would get taken out carl and brett put their names all over the place in the game you know there's there's lots of khs and bj's in any any any place for this opportunity to stick some random letters on um they'll be there so it was a kind of it was equivalent to that but it was it was it was too obvious really so i was expecting it to be taken out and and and tim tim saw it and told mom to take it out and then i think marvin put it back in again just we we were we were a bit rebellious i mean being told to do something was a sure way to make us try to do it and and when we put it back in it was quite late in the day so already the string tables had gone off for localization so that was like a separate file that went off and obviously got localized and we made some ridiculous argument that it would cause trouble if it had because not only would we have to change the english file we'd have to change the other ones but stayed in which is good it's been a sort of it's been a source of pleasure the character movements were all captured very early on using a magnetic motion capture rig called flock of birds from ascension technologies flock of birds is essentially a magnetic capturing system as opposed to these days where they use optical systems where you've just got colored ball reflective walls stuck on people magnetic systems are essentially a wetsuit with a load of magnets tied onto it and then these magnets have cables up to the main system so as you can imagine you could only go so far and if you ex if you went too far you literally pulled the unit off the wall um because it was up high on the wall um and the thing with the room we were in it it had uh you know nice flooring and everything so you could do rolls but um it had magnetic pieces it had metal actually in a lot of the room so yes there was a lot of interference with it so duncan and rhett primarily did all the motion capture probably in i guess i don't know like 94 95 or something when they when they did it and it was all with the most dreadful first generation motion capture technology a big umbilical that went up behind you and then had sensors all over your body so incredibly unwieldy to moving and and they collected a set of data for everything they imagined we could possibly need by the time i was involved there wasn't even the opportunity really to go back and capture more motion data because the flock thing had been disassembled it was the room it used to be in was used to something else that was duncan in that god forsaken flock of birds motion capture thing trying to do these big theatrical um and the just brilliant i mean yeah they're really really good but then also the data that came out of that stuff was absolutely crap so so brett had to take it all and clean it all up i did all the clean up and reanimation of that and duncan blockwood was my uh that was my model for all of that uh what we didn't want to do is have any sort of anticipation uh for the character going to be shot or hit or what have you so duncan had to do this mostly with his eyes closed and i would then go up and belt him in various places and he would react so if you see somebody getting shot in the shoulder and they do this it's because i've just punched him in the shoulder duncan he gave me a list so we would get you know guard walks a couple of different ways guard holding gun uh guard holding um you know automatic rifle or guard holding handgun and i'd get this huge list of things and then i'd get uh shot in the shoulder recover shot in the shoulder and die shot in the shoulder fall forwards you know and essentially it was this huge list of things to do just to fill out so i mean they were very quick to do once we got the system up and running because he only generally needed one or two versions of it to get something that worked the levels and characters was only the start the real key to gold knight's success certainly in the single-player campaign was its mission structure and objectives when carl built the dam he built that tunnel inside the dam which is of no purpose at all in in the film i mean in the film he runs out in the dam and jumps off so there's that and then that whole thing well why don't we put a secret room with computers in there with those objectives i think the reason one of the things about it why it ends up working so well is that when we were doing the objectives in the levels we kind of sat down and said well every level ought to have five i think it was five five objectives because one of the things we noticed was we said this fear the game was way too short because like particularly the dam it's like you know if the dam was the film then it literally is that 20 seconds you get and you run and jump off the down so it's like this is a nightmare it's like you know we can't have a game which has got 20 minute long levels it's just that's not enough game so we needed to make things to make them more interesting so we put all of this stuff in so all the levels were being built with these objectives and also the default difficulty of the game was was double o h was it was the hardest difficulty and then the simpler parts of the game we dumbed down the ai until we thought it was laughably laughably easy and took out objectives until we thought there was nothing to do then when when it gets out into the world and people see the game it it feels like this evolving toy box that just gets better it's like you play the game and then ah but now you go back and there's other things you can do and actually the guys are better that was that was very pleasing how well that worked out every review of goldmine that talks about the single player would say it's like well you know it's amazing because you know it just grows and it's just got this amazing inventiveness whereas you know we looked and said well actually it's not it's it's it's what it is and then we stripped it down it feels very nintendo as well that it's kind of like you know it's like it's like the mario stars you know mario 64 was yeah was was obviously an amazing revolutionary game but that whole idea that you go back and replay the levels almost like you've you know you've made a different choice personally as to what your objectives are yeah yeah so the gadgets were also good because they died yeah it was a good thing for the objectives because you could make objectives but a lot of the objectives you know you look at them i mean they're all yes mario's stars the red stars just but they've got different names in this level the red stars are called called components of some tracking device or whatever take that thing over there and press this button and then it turns into this thing and then you take it over there and give it to him it's like yeah so lots of you know simple fetch quests and stuff and things this was really a backwards way of developing a game as the norm would be for the levels to be designed around the story and missions as the levels were for the most part fleshed out first it gave goldeneye a sense of realism and afforded the player a sense of freedom in how they would approach each level this helped immerse the player in the world of james bond many of the missions and objectives hinged on specific enemy and npc behaviors so the ai was integral to the gameplay so things like just walking around i think we came up with a few of those scripted commands which would just say tell an ai go to this point on a level or go to where the player is or run away from where the player is so just a few simple cases and so maybe we would have had a command like jump to the side which would then play one of the jump animations and then so david who who's basically then taking the these commands that i did and so he would then create a script for an ai which would say put in a command saying dodge to the side he would probably just set it on a random chance to happen just every so often and some sometimes it would happen it would look quite good and sometimes it would happen and it wouldn't look good speed you tend to probably tend to remember the times that it did look good and so just using some random combinations of things you could maybe make the enemies seem more like they were thinking more than they actually were the first seven eye bunker level the start of that level was basically if you if you any time in 95 96 started up we went into the go when went into the bond block and saw people screams it would be the start of that level in the little ducks in a little circular silo thing the door in front of you and bonds gun pointing the door because that was it that that was when you ran the game we always just ran g-serve you typed in g7 and that was it just to test that the game was working and and that part of the game where you open that door and there's two guys one facing away there's a camera and there's an alarm and stuff that really plays very well plays so well because that was the test fed for the ai so that going out shooting those guys running about in there that all worked but you didn't have there were no objectives mark i actually he he wrote this kind of scripting language that drove the connected into the movement and the shooting of authority you know he he built what was necessary because you only ever built what was necessary so he built all of the stuff four characters to go and attack the player um and then also the other little bits the non-combat bits like the running off to press the magnum so he'd written all of that so then i start building up the levels i think the first one i i really got stuck into was gas plan facility so you started doing that and then immediately it's kind of like right but you've got to meet up with trevellian and there's no ai for characters that don't just attack you well yeah and there's something what's he going to be doing he's like well i mean i don't know you've got to meet up with him and then you've got to know then he then they kind of joined your side and then the worst thing happens is some other npcs come in and there's a standoff so how do you do a standoff well they've got to come in and they've got to be not shooting at you when they come in because then you'll shoot them or so somehow you've got no shooting is going to happen and then tuvalion goes up and auromob shoots them in their head but doesn't shoot him in the head and then everyone attacks you and also yeah there's some dialogue going on so we you just we just built it steppy stepping up i guess the other thing is we didn't really have the concept of objectives wasn't in the original design so then the objectives came about so easy objectives are go somewhere that's fine we can do that but go somewhere and get something from someone or interact get boris to hack a computer i'm always surprised at the getting boris to go and hack the computer one because every time i see that i think that must be really annoying to set up because there's quite a lot of ai in it and he does that thing where you know if you're not pointing the gun out and he buggers off that's quite funny the most nightmare thing to set up was that bloody watch where they're cutting the hole in the floor of the train because that thing there's nowhere else in the game where you drop through a hole where that place has actually got a door on it before you open because the the things adore there are a few places like that where it's just all very special case kind of you know hacked in mark and i had this brilliant dialogue which was you know i would say well okay with what we've got i can kind of fake this but it falls apart whenever i need this thing to happen how about a character who like auramal classic example can i have a character who aims another character and not a bomb not the player and then you know and then getting characters to hit marks because if they're doing to do stuff they need to hit the mark reliably mark was great because i'd say what about maybe could we do this and then the next day he'd say you know that thing you've mentioned yeah i've done that so you can put it in by the end by the end of setting up the games we could do like the natalia thing in natalya i mean although people laughed and had natalia character there was no precedent for that in other games she's in yeah it's a character okay yeah she gets shot sometimes but it's a character that's running around in a gunfight kind of following you navigating a 3d space other characters they do sometimes try to shoot at her and someone but then by this time the jungle in the jungle yeah she's running around doing her own thing you know running around shooting stuff and things yeah we built up this this this framework and a big part of the believability ai is okay behind it there's some kind of state machines making decisions but ultimately the player sees animations he would basically sit there playing a level seeing what was good then he would then tune and tweak their ais and their spawn points and like the size of their hearing radius how how well they could hear the player and things like that so each time you fired and it would just create a larger circle around you depending on the like the loudness of the weapon as well and when that touched an ai then they would hear you and then come looking for you yeah so it's very simple for a nintendo console goldeneye was a relatively mature game inevitably some content was cut we had so much feedback particularly from nintendo japan that our game was too dark and too violent and it wasn't a typical nintendo game i think there was there was a suggestion at one point that all rare games were going to start with a spinning rare logo and the sound of children laughing that's not gonna fit in with james bond so so they didn't do it for our game i can't remember they didn't put on the others in the end but yeah we weren't we weren't a typical nintendo product and we weren't a typical rare product some of the animations are you know the death animations are are quite graphic i mean they clearly are people writhing in agony um but then it's kind of you know it's offset by the oh i've been shot in the nuts so you know things like the ak-47 and they said no you can't use any real world guns i don't know if that was a licensing thing or just a nintendo thing because you'll see nintendo were very children focused and they were wrong i mean goldeneye was a problem all the way because it was clearly quite a mature game you know and killed people and that wasn't a typical nintendo product so they were very concerned about the violence in the game and the killing of people and you know we had i mean you know one of the versions we had there was loads of blood in it and we had blood coming off people and there's no absolutely no way you're doing that so you know we have to switch all that off that's why we came up with things like the club name because quite late in the day they said no you have to rename all those weapons to made up names so then it was a quick write just come up with stuff we could it wouldn't be a james bond game without his gadgets the team were keen to include not only many of bond's signature weapons but also as many gadgets from the bond franchise as possible martin hollis right from early on was was very clear that you know he thought one of the things that made von good was his gadgets you know everyone loves bond gadget so we should definitely do that because again first person shooters you go around and shoot things so what if we have some other gadgets that do other things in the game that was a clear from a game design point of view it's an absolute gift you know so things like the magnetic watch and yeah mines and anything like that so we were very keen early on uh to get as many gadgets in as possible so one of the first things i did was model model those because martin mark edmonds was the guy who did all of the weapons the first thing he did was all the guns for shooting and then he did all the other stuff and it was like let's get these working because then we can work out what to do with them in the game so things like the mine yes make it stick to the wall brilliant you know and then if you shoot it it can be on a timer but if you shoot it it explodes as well brilliant you know and suddenly we had all these systems so we were really keen to get as many things in and you know i modeled an awful lot of things that we ended up just not having the time to really do the code for um like the pit on gun that did the thing you know that there was a model for that but we never got that for to use that but uh by putting those in early on it opened up a whole range of things where dave and duncan would just say well we've got all these tools to play with so we can do this and we can do it like bond escaping by using the magnetic watch to get the you know that's not in the movie but he's got a magnetic watch so okay we'll use that you know so yeah it was uh sort of serendipitous that you know you do something because you think it might be useful and then it actually turns out to be much more useful than you thought it was going to be the gadgets often would necessitate extra game systems things sticking to stuff was good i mean yeah so the all the mines things i mean that was i don't think we were following a precedent for that but the idea of you having a you know having a a deployable thing my minds are also i think it's really fun it's like you know the one of the most horrific examples of the things that people have made for warfare i mean yeah minds are abhorrent they're just absolutely hilarious in the game stick a mind on him or or over there where it's the you know whether where the armor pickup's going to spawn stick of mine there throwing knives and that's not that's so not a bomb thing um i don't know i don't know why we came up with that just like you know another one that always gives me the install convert modem or the tracking bug it's so sticky if you put it in the wrong place that's it you have failed and then in in a nod to 1990s game design we don't actually tell you where to put it the addition of these gadgets helped to further the complexity of the objectives adding some welcome variety but also aiding in creating a world that felt authentically bond another element essential to this and something that is just quint essentially james bond was the soundtrack [Music] probably the thing i took most for granted at the time is that the the sound design and the audio is absolutely amazing the first job i got was converting dave wise's music from dinner kong's quest which is donkey kong country 2 to work on the original grey gameboy that was a bit of a task because i didn't really know anything i i've been using midi files it was like quite friendly and when i got to where i was like oh no when they did the game board stuff it was all in hex hex is just like a black stream and white numbers like this kind of programming really and i've never done that before i was like oh my god i can't do it dave was really brilliant at that he came in and kind of showed me really quickly if he went i was like i'm going to design i can't do it so i ran robin you know we had the phones right in the office so robin look you know i'm gonna have to resign i said i just can't do it it's too hard i just don't understand it i've never done it before it's incredible you know so don't be stupid it says get day back tomorrow getting back to show you a bit more slowly and uh write it down so i've got day back and i wrote it down step one press alt four step through whatever it was i wrote it down a massive step-by-step took 25 steps to get a note into the bloody thing you know so that's a and i gradually got round it and it worked i quite enjoyed it but about halfway through well halfway between october and christmas of 95 like graham norgat was doing goldeneye and he was doing um blast court at the same time so he's busy he said look grant can you take up a golden eye because i'm you know i'm busy i was like you kidding me i'd love to do it so it kind of is agreed that i'd do game boy in the morning and go down the afternoon so holly's kept me seeing me and says you know all right here's a i got a brief kind of a couple of pages of a4 with the levels on it there's a brief description what the levels were but that was it and i didn't really see anything i don't think i really paid a lot of attention to that i read it duncan boxwood did it for me so i guess things like frigate i thought you know it's going to be a warship and all that you know but i mean i don't think i paid that much attention to it because all the levels are action levels really aren't they i just was just trying to write things that were atmospheric and have the bond theme in them and we're different totally set about right music that i thought was appropriate for james bond you know when we started it was very much just a list of level names the game was obviously late we didn't know it was going to be late at the time so we were working towards these these deadlines that i was thinking we're never going to hit this but you know we've got to write these pieces of music or whatever so i'd say you know the first 30 of the tunes were written not knowing much about what was going on at all and slowly as the game started developing and progressing you could either go back to those pieces if they didn't work and the ones you were then working on made more sense you know i asked hollis about i've only been there a couple of few few months i wanted that you know and said to hollis you know how long should the music be well about a minute i didn't know how long it's supposed to be and that was way too short should be like three or four minutes period per piece all we had was the right to use the theme tune so we couldn't use any anything else so we had the monty the monty norman theme as arranged by john barry which was fine because there's so there's so many hooks and themes in that one one piece of music that that just did all the work for us i mean you know you've got the guitar part you've got the brass stabs you've got the string string progression you just use one of those anywhere and immediately it's like oh yes james bond you know and the fact we had the rights to the montenegrin team that could use that as well because not he's pr he's very litigious monty norman about his theme tune in so we've got that so i could do anything i wanted to do with it was great i mean we had this double cd at the time which was all the pop tracks that preceded the movies the compilation so i've listened to all of that over and over again and i knew the scores from all that from the john barry said because john paris is amazing so that was it just set about writing bondy stuff you know i knew that with the n64 and the hardware that we had to work with sort of musically i knew that trying to match what they had what match a film score wasn't gonna happen back then and so it was a case of putting our own mind and grants touch to it i suppose and our style so knowing that knowing that you weren't expected to emulate a full orchestra back then was was was a given as well so maybe that was another thing that made it a little bit of an easier project to get into yeah there's probably some nods to some of the other bond songs you know maybe a a little bit close at times um i i know grant he's a lot more forward about it he's like oh yeah i just i took her i took the duran trans song here and i used the drum beat from this here and stuff like that but i think we in most places we we stuck to what we were allowed to to use yeah so unique a bit still so i mean you know the kind of golden eye theme tune that's a lovely place in my stuff you know and i got the um i had my face no more drum beats and i took the um the kind of durang around stabs over it from due to a kill dude like that exactly right understood it's too closer to take one of the stabs out so that and then i kind of you know that was my amalgamation of that so you know you know it bled into everywhere right so you know like now i found there's a really famous sound that i used in my tracks it's kind of a sonar sound like a submarine sonar sound and i found that and that was in the um the soundtrack to the golden eye movie and i just so happened to find that sound on my process effects synthesizer so i used that i've been asked for that sound over the years so many times people are like where'd you get that sound from you know so martin hollis was was very involved in in all aspects of the development so what i generally do is once i'd written a piece that i felt was you know close enough to being finished i'd get him in to listen to it and get his sort of um feedback it was pre-mp free and it was pretty sort of you know anyone that had any space on our hard disks were all you know stupidly small and so it was a lot of work that was anywhere near the net you know pcs or networks it wasn't just like you know sending a file to everyone on teams and listen to this what you think uh to do that i'd put it onto a cassette tape and take it over and play on one of their stereos or something he's thinking about it now overall he was fairly uh pleased with the first passes if you like there's a few points where he'd say i know it's a bit too this or a bit too that but i know he wasn't happy with the the attempt to do the theme tune because i i tried it first and it wasn't really working that kept going back to the sort of drawing ball but luckily grant really hit that out the park when he did like you know the guitar version of it and managed to squeeze that into the n64 so that's uh that was a he took he took what i'd what i'd started and finished it for me if you like because um yeah that was that was hard work getting that one to chill yeah that was the that was the hardest hardest one which it was the most important one to get right you know and i was pretty much having long hair you know because that's why we did the metal guitar version of the main theme and you know because i was adding the guitar there i was playing guitar and killer instruments whatever so it was fun to put them to do a different take on the bottom theme with a bit of metal guitar on it you know but it's different then right because in the game boy you could use using pure fm synthesis was just like tones inside the machine right when it came to the n64 you actually put samples in the machine so we all made up well because me and graham are sharing their sharing that that project and you have a little kind of you make you make it your own midi orchestra so you put all the sampled instruments that you want into the machine and then you use those that's how it works so um on the game box different actually physically it's called fm synthesis so it's like you actually have tones that you can use that are in in the audience it's not like it doesn't play any samples at all where the snares and the n64 actually can physically get a sample put it in the machine it'll play that actual real sample it was a nice step up there was there was a lot more memory but not that much more i mean the the beauty with the n64 as as it went along its its time is the cartridges got bigger something like conker's bad third day was like 64 meg glass core was my first title and that was eight meg and i think gold and i was 12 meg so that was you know 12 megs for the whole game all the graphics all the sound and everything and i think in total we for sound and music we had something like 700k so yeah it involved a lot of sort of careful planning and looping every sound that you could possibly loop crushing the sample rate so it you've got you know you don't want to go past the point where it sounds dreadful but it's if it's possible it's like okay well i'll have to do they they sound quite harsh you know to a motto to modern ears but um it's one of those things with video games that dave wise always told me he said the music always sounds better with the graphics and he's absolutely right you know if you live listen to those sort of soundtracks in uh in isolation they can sound quite quite harsh especially their stuff but when you're playing it with the game you've got the sound effects and everything it kind of works you know it's um it all comes together you know memories really tight on the cartridge because usually when you get any unintended console the first catches they're really small and they get bigger as it goes on to get cheaper to make right so we had to find a way to make the get the guitar in there without having a whole phrase because there's a really long phrase right it's going to take too much space up so graham worked out that he could give like three dude three separate samples and you can and get it out of there so four samples you can make the entire future so that by just by piecing it together and that would be that you should get it quite small memory so something like four phrases in little tiny little bits we need to make lots of compromises you know things like the symbols the symbols you know you go hit a symbol it's got a very long decay right it goes for a long long time you couldn't afford that amount of memory so we had to hit the symbol and get the sound and then put a loop point very close to the start of it and then you put it and sort of like that and then you put an envelope on it so you see you draw an envelope so when you get the attack it goes you get but that was the best we could do so i never intentionally finished finishing golden eye i'm doing sound effects but i got dragged off it to go and start on dreams we came back to gazillion so that's as far as i got i can't remember where that was at some time in 95 must have been a little while into 95 and then graham finished his games and came back and finished off goalie now i think i did all of the sound effects actually because um grant had been moved off quite early on to work on the uh well what became banjo-kazooie but was at the time called dream so he yeah he he wrote a ton of pieces and and then tim's tempers was like these are brilliant absolutely amazing i want you on my team he got sort of shanghaied onto there sound effects wise all of us were very you know wet behind the ears and it was all we're all new to us and we just had this sound library of about 50 cds or something where you had this big telephone book uh directory and you'd look up all these sound effects and then you go and grab them grab the cd listen to it and it's like yeah maybe and then it's so different to today where you know everything's at your fingertips and everyone's got you know filled recorders and stuff like that so if you want to make sounds it's it's just as quick sometimes just to do it yourself so i've there's a lot of stuff in there that's sort of recognizable you know you'll hear them in other stuff [Music] graeme and grant evenly shared the workload when it came to composing the music with graham composing for these levels and grant for these they both compose pieces for the damn level and again the music was a pretty even split for the multiplayer tracks and the extra bits like the intro end credits in-game menus and so on if you want to know exactly who composed what you can pause here and see the composer for each piece one composer who snuck some music into the game other than graeme and grant was robin beanland a rare employee known for his music in many of their games he composed the elevator music in control [Music] first person shooters were still in their infancy at this stage the term first person shooter wasn't even commonly used at this point so the team were really experimenting with what would and wouldn't work and of course they had the n64's rather unusual controller to contend with when rare first got one it was in a box so the only way you could use it was by putting your hands inside this box so no one could see what it was or something and then i remember another version a controller from another console some like holes drilled into it and and this the actual stick attached to that so nintendo were still working on it obviously to come up with a final design and stuff that was probably with like a control with like the two handles that you would hold whereas the one that nintendo then actually ended up with was one with the three handles yeah which is quite quite odd when you think about it now so yeah so i guess the main thing was today that there was just the one stick although we would have known that at the time so obviously the big game on nintendo 64 was mario 64. so i remember that was one of the things that we talked about that to try and make the controls in gold knife feel familiar to someone who is used to playing mario so one hand on the center prom or whatever is using the stick so you could move around just using that single single hand and then also so it's quite good because the trigger was underneath so which so it felt quite like holding a gun first person controls change over time don't they but that was that was one of the first games to do that obviously and the analog stick particularly in i mean that was one of the great things when we first sort of thought about doing virtual cop we did that because we we'd been given a a prototype of the the n64 controller which had the little stick on the top the analog stick and we thought well this is perfect for aiming you know because it originally was you said you know about which the great thing about that was you had the gun which you pointed at the screen and said well we won't have that but if you've got this thumbstick then suddenly you've got a pointer you know and so that could work really well and so we spent an enormous amount of time playing with different setups and again with the sliding things with the well this for us that felt natural and i mean obviously don't use those kinds of controls anymore but at the time that just felt you know you can you can hide behind a wall and slide out and then aim the thing and shoot someone it's like well this that's you know that feels really good uh and also we played a lot with the auto aim support as well to make it work but uh yeah that sort of that controller and and that sort of feel of it and it just just worked well like we thought you know as time got on the gold light has always had this thing where people say you know oh it's amazing it's amazing but there's always this yeah but it doesn't control very well if you play it because obviously when we were making it there was no accepted convention for how you would do those controls and also there's only one analog stick so the controls are what they are and i think i mean we tried every combination under the sun and i think the default controls for goldmine are the right controls but you always have this niggling thing of people kind of going yeah but you know it doesn't stand up if you play it today you know it's like it controls really badly it's you know the frame rate was terrible but the xpla reissue i mean essentially it's the same game code it's the same everything's the same but it's hitting consistently a good frame rate and you can play it with dual analog and lots of people saying actually you know what it plays really well um so that that's a nice thing to get that kind of out there and it always kind of ranked with me you know that whole thing like yeah yeah well it was good for its time but it doesn't stand up yeah i think it does stand up when most people think of goldeneye they think of multiplayer the multiplayer mode was quite astonishingly added very late as late as april 1997 four months before the game's release it must have at one point been a two player multiplayer mode as we can see from early promotional videos the addition of a multiplayer mode made goldeneye a must-own game and the four controller ports of the nintendo 64 a feature which rare were instrumental in implementing made it the go-to local multiplayer game for years i think the multiplayer was its usp that was that was the thing that that sold it prior to that there's no online if you want to play a lan game you've got to bring a whole bunch of stuff it's an abstract nightmare whereas this was you know perfect for college dorms and stuff grab your n64 grab your controllers you don't need anything else go for it i remember at rare you know tim stamper was always very cynical about the idea that you would have this game which was a kind of competitive first person game but everyone could see everyone else's screen just it just it just makes it different famously it didn't get put in until very late in the day and was almost kind of like a stretch goal i don't remember there ever being any kind of design for the multiplayer or list of things we would have but it was just like you know what can we possibly do so and then and then all of those things like you know the game modes like the golden gun they're all just you know completely free-wheeling brainstorming what can we do and how can we make it themed at all to bond in some way we were of that generation that you know split screen was had come in a bit before and we had the power to do four player split screen and we just had so much you know and we've done a lot of that while we're developing we were playing a lot of doom network doing when we were playing these other you know these these site and these simulated flight simulators and things where we were shooting each other down in tank ones and our big lunchtime game was was bomberman which we absolutely love four player bomberman all on one screen and the fun with that was just you know absolutely ribbing each other's bits duncan in particular would take his losses very bad i mean i was crap at it anyway so i knew i was going to lose but duncan would get particularly upset about it and it was that whole you know people getting really annoyed and gagging up on each other that sort of four people around the screen is still brilliant obviously it's well known that golden knight we didn't actually tell rare for a while that we were making multiplayer split screen version we did that evenings privately to get it running first to check that it was fun and when we first presented it there were quite a few people saying well you can see the other person's screen so it's not going to work but actually you know it makes knowing we know it doesn't make any difference at all it's perfectly good you know you're busy looking at your screen maybe you do glance at the other screen from time to time to see where someone is but it doesn't detect from the game so you know there was a lot of concern that it wouldn't before play split screen on a first-person shooter wouldn't work and and it totally does the multiplayer gave it leg so people weren't trading it in i mean that was the big thing with other games you people would play it and then they trade it in whereas people were clearly keeping hold of their golden eye copies because they were playing it multiplayer again and again again with their mates that was kind of when we started to realize that the game was going to be well would be people wouldn't think it was crap because we were always incredibly self-critical so when the multiplayer was in just everyone at rare wanted to play it so you know there was a black market between the teams rare but you know goldeneye team would supply roms to other teams for playing out of hours the killer team i think well they were probably whether they might have been the conquer team by then so chris siva chris tilston knows all those guys they used to play bombed chris tilton on the team who was kind of like the lead designer whatever he was always boasting about being better at it than everyone else so we did a special version that changed his hitbox on his dev kit so that he just always lost basically as a wind-up from our point of view it was a no-brainer because we'd had so much fun playing these other multiplayer games and we thought we just have to i remember all of us were sitting around and it was discussion was like well i think looking at the performance you know i think we can do a split screen for player and it shouldn't hurt the performance too much and it was steve ellis obviously who went off he he joined the team a bit later and it was one of the first things i think he was asked to work on by mike said look just go and see if you can get this running split screen and see what it does and i mean steve was an awesome program when he came off and literally within a couple of hours it was running to play a split screen it's like why can we do four player yeah we do four player two and it's like okay and then it was like okay carl can you start making an environment specifically for this that's a bit cheaper that we can run to these sorts of specs so i started building that and you know within two or three days we had a multiplayer an early version of the complex running and playing and it's like the secret hiding places in the complex things like that you know that purely came out of me cheating because i was getting my ass handed to me playing the multiplayer um and they put they put the um the radar on and i really hated that because it showed you where you were so i thought well if they're going to cheat by doing that then i'm going to shoot so i went and changed the backgrounds and built in these little hut cubbies with the one-way walls she could do and didn't tell anyone and they couldn't work out that evening we were playing and no one could work out how i kept coming out from places they didn't know i wasn't and killing them from behind and then it stayed in the game because actually that's really funny we just leave it in you know so they went and so it's like having that ability to play the game with each other and yeah make really quick change that was done in one afternoon it was like right tonight i know we're going to be playing the complex tonight i'm going to change it and i'm going to put these little cubby holes in there and i'm going to hide in them and come out and kill people complex it was the test one that we've built if you look at it it's got pretty much every idea under the sun in it because it was just me trying to trying everything out so there's a room full of columns and there's things that overlook other spaces and there's narrow bits and there's open bits and it was designed to be super cheap to run as fast as possible because i knew we had you know four players split screen with guns and bombs going off so it's fundamentally a black and white level because it uses intensity textures because that was the biggest res i could get and it was stuck onto very large simplified polys to try and keep the count down to the minimum so in that sense it's probably the purest you know the levels i mean there's other ones that look a lot but i love the aztec level i've had so much fun doing that level because of all the moon raker stuff which is one of my favorite bond movies but you know that one's the purest in that sense it was just like yeah this is so much fun and we were playing it in the evenings and then i think with simon farmer came over he was the production manager at rare and he saw us playing this and he's like what's the hell's that and it's like oh it's got four player split screen and he's like you're wasting your time making a multi-player version you haven't even got the main game done yet and as soon as it went to nintendo and they saw it they're like yeah that's great which is probably you know why they you know in the end it was like okay however long it takes to make this good fine we'll cope with it because they could see that it was just fun whether it was the single player or multiplayer mode the team spent a great deal of time playing goldeneye during its development reacting to these play sessions so with with the with the single player stuff the story stuff you know i flatter myself i probably was quite a good judge what was going on because you know those story the level setups i would just play them to death before they went anywhere testing certainly one thing was we were really worried that the game would just feel very samey all the way through so trying to make different levels play in different ways so the silo is very much a prolonged corridor shooter kind of thing with interesting you know you come in and there's some guys in boxes where other levels are more kind of free form of necessity particularly the exterior levels like the 7i x series and things we always thought they were crap because it's basically you you're just you're in a huge big room that's pretending to be a snowy environment and these guys all they can do is come out but you're trying to moderate it in ways that make it feel like it's a bit more kind of there aren't just a whole bunch of people running at you out of the dark trying to kill you so i think rare is probably used to working in that kind of way where you would try ideas and iterate and when you find something that's good then you keep going with it yeah i mean i think that's and that process probably came from nintendo as well because i think that's how they work on all their games it's really from trying things and iterating on ideas you you find out what's really good for the player and what's fun by the end and i'm talking now sort of spring 97 i could actually load the game up in my room play the levels and right to that and that made so much more sense and it was so much it just helped so much more obviously the best way to do it is to be able to play the game and play the game whilst you're writing the piece and listen to it see what's working and stuff but we don't always get that luxury and it certainly is a luxury of of being an in-house composer which you know is quite rare but no pun intended i've said it before you know one of the reasons i think gold and i played well in the end was because we got it running very early and we sent lots of builds over to mario club in america in nintendo and seattle and they would they loved it and they would send us back loads and loads of comments and we should do this and we should try that and you know how about this you know there was just lots of time to iterate and to play around with things and you know that's the great secret to good game designers you know make sure you get to play your game a lot before you release it well almost all of them played it no never played it i'm not a gamer you know i did i put my all into everything i was doing but i didn't know anything about game dynamics i still don't so you know leave that's the people that do one of golden eye's features came partly as a result of these gameplay sessions as well as the unique structure of the difficulty levels the team wanted to include cheats and assigning target times to each level seemed like a great pathway to unlocking them so it had to be done right near the end of testing when the levels were actually complete whichever tester um either rare or nintendo who could get through that level the fastest and so the fastest times were based on those they deliberately made the runway level the easiest time to achieve so that the player would unlock it without even trying and then hide the more desirable cheeks behind times which were trickier to beat it's the your first sample of the drugs is free put it in your top pocket take that home with you it's a strong design principle with rewards and games and then you feel ownership it's like i did that and also i wasn't even trying i bet you i'm really good at this because i don't know whether the times came before the cheats or the times were a consequence of wanting to have something to unlock with teams because obviously there's no score i think again there i think we inadvertently invented speed running because it was suddenly it was a thing the game actually encouraged you to speed run and record it on the cartridge with your time so it's a verifiable thing and then the cheap the cheats were just everything anything that anyone could think of i think it's also really interesting that we had that thing where because it only records the times to the second it just creates this wonderful uncertainty as to you know so you've got these things like you know all these records was like well you know the record is i don't know like 32 but we know we can get 31 because if you look at the time it's actually people are doing 31.2 but it's probably more interesting than if it gave you it to two decimal places because it becomes much more an event whenever someone rolls back one of those speed runtimes by a second and that record has students for five years or something it's a big event speed running has given golden eye longevity uncommon to most games with a community that's still very active to this day when it was finally released after around three years of development goldeneye was an absolute smash [Music] a licensed game which against the odds became the nintendo 64's most successful non-first-party game and third best selling overall selling over 8 million copies being trumped only by super mario 64 and mario kart in sales but this success was a bit of a slow burner the story i heard was that nintendo had picked the license up pretty cheap because they hadn't made a goal they had made a james bond movie for four years because there had been some legal dispute movie tie-ins for games were traditionally just awful anyway you know they'd all be everyone that was just most of them were terrible and so there wasn't a lot of appetite for the for doing it so they picked up cheap they'd offered it rare rare offered it to martin martin had said well i'll only do it if it's an n64 game you know and and you know or when martin came to see me about it in the first place and said are you interested in bond you know on the one hand i said yeah absolutely love it and yeah i'd love to make a bond game but i remember we were working in the block next to the team that were making blast corps and i remember looking at what they were doing you know that's great you know their own ip and they've got and it's going to be a rare game nintendo game and it looks really fun and we were working on a movie tie-in and i was thinking god we've got you know it's like and i was loving doing it but i thought you know we've got an uphill struggle here we were all students we fresh out at the university that you know been given to a bunch of people who never made a game before which kind of tells you what the expectation was you know it wasn't given to their best team it was given to the newbies who never made anything before we were definitely the least glamorous project in the in the whole of the company when it started and for most of it you know even then you know where we're busy making all these really fun brightly colored kids games and glass core and jet force gemini and donkey kong race diddy kong racing and something and we were making this dark gritty first person shooter we went to e3 two years in a row it was both the years i think it was in atlanta rather than la for a change they've done you know nintendo we want had quite a decent chunk of the nintendo stand and they've done a nice recreated some of the backdrops and stuff they did a really great job on it and you know we were just there standing around watching people you know we hadn't seen a lot of people playing it other than ourselves and a few people are rare so just the chance to watch people come in and play it was great and you know it's quite it wasn't a pick up and play game like a lot of nintendo games you know you had to learn first of all they had the controller with a you could see people were taking a while to get the hang of it and i remember spending quite a lot of time with new players explaining how to move and shoot and stuff but after a couple of days we you know a lot of people coming to saying ah you know played goal tonight and then they say oh did you you know did you work on the game love it brilliant fantastic you know really enjoyed it so you sort of i mean it's a small small group of people but you came away thinking okay the people who are playing it like it you know and they're spending time with it so that was really sort of encouraging and you know then we went back and finished it off and it launched and you know and the first christmas it obviously sold they didn't make enough and it sold out which on the one hand was great but on the other hand you know we didn't know if it was kind of missed its sort of chance and then the next e3 we went back and they still you know they had it back on the stands again and just crowds of people all around playing it and playing the death match on it and just thinking oh this is great you know people really like it you know so yeah it was it was fabulous to get that first sort of public affirmation that that people who hadn't played it before were playing it and getting into it and enjoying it it's nice feeling to see people enjoying something you created the e3 we all went to e3 97 and it was really strange because yeah we had there was like about eight booths or something it was on or nintendo says it was quite it was quite prominent it would start up in the morning and just have the damn level a lot and then they go oh that's really yeah love it great demo and we said well you know you can play the rest of it and i think people were really surprised that it was you know it wasn't just this part of the game it's like it was was the whole thing and again the multiplayer and stuff and i i remember we you know did have like pc gamers who would have come to scott eventually coming later in the you know three days to play actually this is really good it's a funny one um i mean it did well from the start but they didn't i remember there was a there was a bet between a couple of the seniors nintendo executives about how many it would sell before christmas and one of the i think it was ken lobber it would break a million and the other hand and they'd only they only made about a million cartridges um and and then it sold out really quickly and we had no idea what to expect but you know we thought well a million cartridges in the first few months and you know the nintendo 64 hadn't been out for that long then so it was clearly selling you know pretty much everyone who was buying the console was picking up golden at the same time so that was like okay this is good it was the early days of the internet as well so you know very early days of internet so there were just a few sort of gaming forums setting up where people would chat and then we were getting all the feedback that people couldn't get it because it sold out everywhere you know and there were stories of people in north america crossing into canada because they found a store that had a couple of copies you know and we were sort of on one hand you know really pleased on the other hand really frustrated it's like well because we were on royalties you know we were getting we would get a bonus based on the sales it's like well they're not selling any because they've sold out so sold out really quickly and then dived because there was no none available but as soon as they made more then it sold again and yeah i think what was interesting then was that you know it sold the next quarter we got quarterly statements of you know how many insult and we figured it would die off pretty quickly but yeah every quarter new statement came through and it sold another million and then it sold another million you know and then it's on a million and a half the second year it sold more than the first year and the third year it sold more than first two years combined like how did games never do that right when i went to america i realized that in the college dorms goldeneye was the the game that all the guys were playing right that was that was the college dorm game everyone played it like you mentioned go tonight everyone i mean the street i did golden hour you know they know that more than panty i think i got dragged off and you just forget how successful it was i know it really changed first-person shooters forever like that whole stealth thing wasn't there until golden idea you know make a lot of noise they're going to confine you kill you that's in every single first person shooter that you find now but it was it was golden eye first you know it's amazing to be associated with it you know you know i loved music it was great fun part of its success was thanks to ken lob at nintendo of america who championed goldeneye right through its development ken's name was the inspiration for the club the mostly useless submachine gun ken struck a deal with blockbuster whereby they could return rental copies of goldeneye if it wasn't popular but get real you'd rather be playing video games you can run them from blockbuster ken love was kind of like the guy who was he was almost like honorary member of rep he had some input into the marketing and and stuff in the states and he got noa to supply copies to blockbuster for free for rental just because he knew that if people played it they'd want to buy it people like ken lobb over in america who who was a big fan of the of the game and the team and you know kept batting for us over there saying no let them finish it let them finish it it'll be good in the end you know so those sorts of people are really critical you know and yeah we made a good game but you know we wouldn't have got it out if all those other people in in the rare and the nintendo hadn't had the confidence you know in the backing so yeah that rare nintendo relationship was really important none of the rental copies were returned and it ended up being the number one rented game for three years so in the states they had rental charts for the different games so like renting out cartridges for the weekend order it was a really big thing over there and they just had these rental charts going and it just seemed to go on for months but gold mine was always like the highest rental and presumably people just keep renting it um to play multiplayer so that was always really cool to hear about goldeneye went on to win several awards including a bafta and was nominated for seven interactive achievement awards winning four i can remember when the team went to the bafta awards and i remember going to the e3 awards which was which was absolutely phenomenal um because we just won category after category after category they're the sort of like um game oscars and we just we won just about everything i think we came away with six that night so that was a glimpse into the development of one of gaming's defining titles thanks to an extremely talented and dedicated team goldeneye solidified its rightful place in the pantheon of video games my mother was a nurse you know and she she said she helped people get better and my father built buildings for people to live in and they're still standing in places you know and i make video games which you know feels like a very pointless ephemeral thing but when you make a game like goldeneye and clearly so many people bought it and enjoyed it and loved it and still love it it's nice to know that you had that i suppose you know it's like someone who writes a really good song that keeps getting played on the radio year after year after year you know it's music you know pretty much lasts forever because the technology doesn't matter so much but with a video game it does but so if you make a game that has a bit of longevity in it then you feel really honoured and surprised the fact that i'm talking to you today just goes to show how lucky i was to have been involved in that project it's wonderful that people are interested after all this time and now you know i've gone to kind of like retro shows and stuff and things and it's still highly sought after it's a shame that's kind of lost from the games world now but that whole thing of printed parts and manuals and the cartridges and stuff and things are really very special and it's great privilege to be part of that i've got such fun memories i've been at rare back back in that day i just couldn't believe i might i was there rare was just a spectacular thing to be part of that in that kind of golden age of rare you know before microsoft bought it just spectacular goldeneye's influence on gaming particularly first person shooters is undeniable and its legacy is still going strong today thank you very much for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: onaretrotip

Views: 525,847

Keywords: GoldenEye, N64, Nintendo 64, James Bond, 007, David Doak, Rare games, Documentary, Interview, Goldeneye 64, Goldeneye N64

Id: tokaUo_m39M

Length: 101min 22sec (6082 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021