8 ms·

Goldeneye 64's inspirational startup story

163 points by alexkiwi 14y ago

alexkiwi 14y ago
Proximity mines on temple, that almost never happened. Thankfully that one developer stood for what's right and made our childhoods that much better.
timjahn 14y ago
Best game ever. So many fun times with my buddies playing the 4 screen multi-player, throwing proximity mines on every spawn spot in the Facility.
- trevelyan 14y ago
  My favorite trick is that the spawn sequences were not actually random. They would cycle predictably and only randomize if someone was too close to the respawn point. Especially in levels like the bunker, if you hovered just a breadth out of distance in a two-player game, it was possible to wrack up multiple kills very easily and would often take an equally experienced player to even have a chance of making it to the nearest weapon in time.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    Heh, you even have your HN account named after a 007 character :)
  - timjahn 14y ago
    Haha, yup. I used to do that all the time too. Pissed off my friends usually.
rrbrambley 14y ago
Power Weapons in the Stack. I owned the top floor. Immediately prior to reading this, I was writing about how non-game developers can indeed bring a unique perspective to the table when developing games. This is definitely an inspirational story and helpful in reaffirming my thoughts. Thanks for sharing.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  One of the things that I liked about Goldeneye was just how damn many multiplayer modes there were. eg. The Klobb was a crappy gun (low damage, huge cone of fire), but switch to one-shot-kills and it's suddenly an uber weapon :) My favorite modes were one shot kills with knives or slappers only, power weapons with health cranked up, or anything involving prox mines :> I haven't played it for years now, and I'm not sure how easy it is to get N64 consoles now, but if you want something similar, TimeSplitters for the Gamecube had very similar gameplay (and a lot more options, including bots and fully customisable loadouts).
  - jrockway 14y ago
    I liked the remote mines a lot more. You could go hide in the vent in facility and look at other people's screens to see where they were. When they got to the right place, bam, you detonated the mine. God that was a great game.
    - anthonyb 14y ago
      The "problem" with remote mines was that you could throw a mine and press A+B at the same time while it was still in mid-air. BOOM! Instant detonation! So you'd be able to just insta-kill people who weren't expecting it. Eventually it balanced out because everyone would be a lot more careful about getting close and going around corners, but ... let's just say that raegquits are a lot more fun in-person :)
    - dcpdx 14y ago
      Yes! Left joystick + R + left C, twirl around and end up back in the vent. Plant a mine at the spawn point and hope you don't end up there when you die before someone else does!
  - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
    haha, license to kill, with power weapons, just spray with the rcp90, and you were good to go! Those were the days...
  - 14y ago
eru 14y ago
Alas, the article is a bit thin on the details.
- hughlomas 14y ago
  Someone throwing some quotes into a reddit-esque nostalgia post and topping it off with his name in size 40 font hardly qualifies as an article. When I first saw the title I was hoping for something along the lines of the recent Starcraft article (http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-s...).
whalesalad 14y ago
Pretty cool to see so many fellow hackers with similar positive memories of this game. It's pretty indicative of the age group here on HN. For reference, I'm 23. This was one of the greatest games ever made, no doubt. I've actually never been able to relate to a lot of my buddies who can game for hours on end. Starcraft, WoW, etc.. bore me after 30 minutes. Goldeneye on the other hand ... I could have easily died from starvation without the parental supervision. Anyhow, back to the original post. It's interesting to me that the original team had no idea what they were doing. I still look back on apps or things I built years ago, lacking absolutely any idea of what I was doing, and being amazed at how successful or great they ended up. Inversely, sometimes the product or thing I spent the most time agonizing over ended up being a total flop. More and more I am learning that you just gotta side with the majority of the 80/20, stick to your gut feelings, and jam jam jam to get that puppy out the door. It's always tricky to find that perfect place between being a bootstrapped/scaffolded/barebones MVP product and a well-thought out, carefully designed product. I'm glad the Rare team managed to hit it with Goldeneye, they're an inspiration.
- Hannan 14y ago
  >> It's pretty indicative of the age group here on HN. For reference, I'm 23. I'm not sure exactly what it says, but I'm a decade older than you, and I lost countless days to this game. The best opponent I had was four years older than me! I don't quite understand the love for the four player multi though. It seemed unplayably choppy to me with with that many opponents, but I never did get that expansion pack that sticks in the front. Also didn't care for the limited view range. But heads up multi-player... fantastic.
  - smoyer 14y ago
    I'm another decade older and I lost countless lives playing this game ... My (then) 9th grade son, his friend and his friend's little sister consistently ended each life just seconds after it began!
  - joshschreuder 14y ago
    Did the Expansion Pak [0] even work for games that didn't support it? From memory the game had to specifically support it or it didn't get used. I remember Perfect Dark (the spiritual successor to Goldeneye) required it to run most of the game. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expansion_Pak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expansi...
dhconnelly 14y ago
I enjoyed reading this until I reached the end: "I still have nightmares about playing Temple and not being able to find the proximity mines. If you like James Bond, lattes, startups and design, you'd enjoy my tweets." Talk about a non sequitur.
- Jonanin 14y ago
  Yeah, what the hell? I don't get why people beg for followers at the end of their blog posts. It just leaves a sour taste in my mouth after what would have been a great reading experience.
  - benihana 14y ago
    >I don't get why people beg for followers at the end of their blog posts. You don't understand why people promote themselves? You made it to the end of the blog post, which likely indicates that you enjoyed the content. Why wouldn't he say "hey follow me on twitter so that if I write another post that doesn't make it to HN front page, you can hear about it," to try to get some extra followers? Would you prefer he ask you to follow him at the beginning of the post?
    - dhconnelly 14y ago
      There's a huge "Follow so-and-so" Twitter button immediately following the writing, so I'm pretty sure that the corny self-promotion didn't need to be part of the article itself. I read lots of articles where this happens, and it's always jarring.
      - robryan 14y ago
        The suggestion text has been shown to work better than just placing a button. Building up your personal brand can be worth a lot in the long run, so why not?
        michaelgrafl 14y ago
alexkiwi 14y ago
Anyone interested in putting together a game in SF?
- chadnickbok 14y ago
  Yes, yes we are. Edit: And by that I mean you should take point and make it happen ;)
jivatmanx 14y ago
Proximity Mines under the ammo spawns. Invisible room in facility, entrance in Temple. Race to choose oddjob.
- petitmiam 14y ago
  Oddjob was banned pretty early on in my family.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    My house rules were "Pick any character you like, I'll kill you anyway" :)
- function_seven 14y ago
  I don't remember the Facility having an invisible room. I tried Googling, but don't see anything. Can you explain?
  - defen 14y ago
    There was a bug that allowed you to get back up into the ventilation duct through which you enter the level (in single player mode). You have to go into the bathroom stall, crouch on the toilet, and spin around a few times IIRC. Once you're up there, no one's getting you out until you run out of ammo.
- alexholehouse 14y ago
  It was all about the race to the RCP90 on stack in multplayer - that white corridor of death...
  - smokinjoe 14y ago
    My friends and I nicknamed that gun the "mow-down machine."
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  haha, I def remember having a "no oddjob" rule. And if you did pick oddjob, lord have mercy, cuz everyone was comin after your ass and nobody else! For whatever reason, I would irrationally target anyone playing as boris as well...
cloudwalking 14y ago
Temple in Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer game ever. Tangential to OP's article, http://console.fm http://console.fm is awesome.
- alexkiwi 14y ago
  Haha thank you, it's a really great project to work on.
  - tejaswiy 14y ago
    This is brilliant. Thanks so much for doing an API! As much as I like web apps, I'd hate to keep a tab open for the entire day in my browser. I'll go build a simple native mac app that sits in the toolbar and plays music.
- RandallBrown 14y ago
  The Complex was a much better level than the temple in my opinion.
- jrajav 14y ago
  It is pretty awesome, I agree; but am I the only one for whom it doesn't work at all in Chrome?
- whalesalad 14y ago
  Perfect Dark was like a reskin of GoldenEye huh? That was awesome too. My cousins and I used to scare ourselves shitless by turning on bots to highest difficulty, giving them max speed and only tranquilizer guns. They'd still pwn you!
k-mcgrady 14y ago
I've never been a big gamer. I have a short attention span and lose interest too quickly, but I loved Goldeneye 64. The N64 was my first games console (I got it soon after it came out, I think I was 7 at the time) and Goldeneye was the game that was bundled with it. In general there were some great N64 games. The were the obvious ones like Super Mario, Mission Impossible was another good one, but my favourite was Diddy Kong Racing. It was the only game I've ever got 'addicted' too. The N64's also one of the few pieces of tech I've held on to. Every now and then I hook it up and get another few weeks of fun out of it.
DanBC 14y ago
I really loved the menu screen showing you what levels you'd done and what difficulty level you'd done them on. Simple, efficient. It took me weeks to realise that the cut-scene graphics were actually useful and not just fluff. They often provided hints and tips or let you know about enemies. There's a bunch of stuff still in the rom code that isn't accessible from the game - the hidden island; some glitchy levels. And there's some bits left over from the "notorious" but removed "put your face in the game" mode. (Which used the GB camera to map face photos onto game models for multiplayer but got removed after a mass shooting.) I loved the train; I loved the tunnel in the damn. I hated trying to keep the bloody hostages alive on the boat. The first few times I set the alarm off were scary. This was an amazing game. The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why.
- nikatwork 14y ago
  > The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why. That's arguably age-related nostalgia. I feel the same way about the Super Nintendo instead of the N64. http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1322 http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1322
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    The N64 was a very poor system for games. You had a few very good ones and a lot of crap. The Playstation was a way more versatile system with great games in all genres. Hell, even the Saturn was more complete in terms of software.
    - lmm 14y ago
      The N64 had fewer games and more expensive than the competition, but the quality standard was far higher (there was a whole lot of unbelievably crap shovelware produced for playstation) and it was a more powerful system; the best N64 games (of which Goldeneye was certainly one) were by and large better than the best Playstation games. In "top 10 games of all time" lists the only Playstation game you tend to see is FFVII, which deserves its place but is more a triumph of storytelling than gameplay; from the N64 Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye both regularly feature. It was only towards the end of its life that we saw Playstation games comparable to those in technical terms (heck, while it's been overshadowed by later instalments I remember being blown away by Rogue Squadron back in '97 or so), and I don't think we ever saw the equal of Perfect Dark until the next console generation and Halo.
avar 14y ago
I'd be just as interested in how Rare went from doing Goldeneye 64 to making what seem to be relatively mediocre games today.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Pre MS buyout: GoldenEye 64, Blast Corps, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark. After MS buyout?
  - throwaway1979 14y ago
    I really enjoyed Viva Piniata and Kameo! Both were extremely high quality. What is amazing about Viva Piniata was that my retired mom (afraid of turning on the computer) got interested seeing me play and started playing herself! She ended up unlocking every single feature/award in the game, and this led her to play other Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I got her the first iPad when it came out and she is now essentially a regular computer user! While Viva Piniata might not have been a commercial success, I know one life it changed and I'd bet there are a lot more. Frankly, I wish the world had more daring developers/game companies/people. The situation with Rare isn't a good one as your quip points out. Sadly, no matter how artistically awesome your games are, without commercial success, you cannot survive. This leads to a world of xbox games where pretty much every game is a shooter. IMHO, that is why tablets are kicking console gamings behind. It seems more creative titles for tablets (and perhaps the indie game section of xbox live) than for the xbox today.
- NickPollard 14y ago
  Much of the main talent who led the GoldenEye team at Rare (David Doak, Karl Hilton, Steve Ellis, Graeme Norgate) left to form their own studio, Free Radical Design[1]. FRD went on to release the Timesplitters games to good success, but later hit trouble and have now been bought out by CryTek and renamed CryTek UK. Martin Hollis, the other senior member of the team also left for pastures new after working on Perfect Dark. I'm sure Rare still has a lot of brilliant hard working team members, but the main drivers of GoldenEye have long since gone. [1] Disclaimer: I used to work at Free Radical at one point.
smokinjoe 14y ago
That game was in the top 5 N64 games sold, routinely hitting the top spot for roughly 3 years [and perhaps a little change]. It was an incredible run, I remember following it in EGM.
macspoofing 14y ago
It was still a bad idea to base your game on movie ip.
ae7 14y ago
I spent a ton of time playing this game as a kid. I remember the game being flawless as far as gameplay, and those were good times. Point: Maybe more mainstream games should be created by inexperienced teams to compete with the 6-month Call of Duty plot change cycle (i.e. same shit different day).
mweibel 14y ago
It's been such a great game, I lost countless hours as well. They redid the original Goldeneye for Wii and sadly I bought it. It's a horrible remake. Aiming with pointing using the Wii Remote is really hard and turning around takes ages, but this isn't the worst thing. They changed the multiplayer game mode: You can't pick up other weapons as you could in the 64 version - you have to chose in the beginning which weapons you'd like... I always loved this in the 64 version (proximity mines..oh yes :D)
doomlaser 14y ago
For those interested in more development anecdotes, the game's director did a full postmortem at this year's GDC Europe: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-GoldenEye.php http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-Gold...
bittersweet 14y ago
This article seemed very familiar, and I found the original article where a lot of the quotes/text came from, 'The Making of Goldeneye' from may 2011 [1] [1]: http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_goldeneye.html http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_golden...

163 points by alexkiwi 14y ago

Proximity mines on temple, that almost never happened. Thankfully that one developer stood for what's right and made our childhoods that much better.

timjahn 14y ago

Best game ever. So many fun times with my buddies playing the 4 screen multi-player, throwing proximity mines on every spawn spot in the Facility.

trevelyan 14y ago
My favorite trick is that the spawn sequences were not actually random. They would cycle predictably and only randomize if someone was too close to the respawn point. Especially in levels like the bunker, if you hovered just a breadth out of distance in a two-player game, it was possible to wrack up multiple kills very easily and would often take an equally experienced player to even have a chance of making it to the nearest weapon in time.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  Heh, you even have your HN account named after a 007 character :)
- timjahn 14y ago
  Haha, yup. I used to do that all the time too. Pissed off my friends usually.

rrbrambley 14y ago

Power Weapons in the Stack. I owned the top floor. Immediately prior to reading this, I was writing about how non-game developers can indeed bring a unique perspective to the table when developing games. This is definitely an inspirational story and helpful in reaffirming my thoughts. Thanks for sharing.

anthonyb 14y ago
One of the things that I liked about Goldeneye was just how damn many multiplayer modes there were. eg. The Klobb was a crappy gun (low damage, huge cone of fire), but switch to one-shot-kills and it's suddenly an uber weapon :) My favorite modes were one shot kills with knives or slappers only, power weapons with health cranked up, or anything involving prox mines :> I haven't played it for years now, and I'm not sure how easy it is to get N64 consoles now, but if you want something similar, TimeSplitters for the Gamecube had very similar gameplay (and a lot more options, including bots and fully customisable loadouts).
- jrockway 14y ago
  I liked the remote mines a lot more. You could go hide in the vent in facility and look at other people's screens to see where they were. When they got to the right place, bam, you detonated the mine. God that was a great game.
  - anthonyb 14y ago
    The "problem" with remote mines was that you could throw a mine and press A+B at the same time while it was still in mid-air. BOOM! Instant detonation! So you'd be able to just insta-kill people who weren't expecting it. Eventually it balanced out because everyone would be a lot more careful about getting close and going around corners, but ... let's just say that raegquits are a lot more fun in-person :)
  - dcpdx 14y ago
    Yes! Left joystick + R + left C, twirl around and end up back in the vent. Plant a mine at the spawn point and hope you don't end up there when you die before someone else does!
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  haha, license to kill, with power weapons, just spray with the rcp90, and you were good to go! Those were the days...
- 14y ago

eru 14y ago

Alas, the article is a bit thin on the details.

hughlomas 14y ago
Someone throwing some quotes into a reddit-esque nostalgia post and topping it off with his name in size 40 font hardly qualifies as an article. When I first saw the title I was hoping for something along the lines of the recent Starcraft article (http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-starcraft http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-s...).

whalesalad 14y ago

Pretty cool to see so many fellow hackers with similar positive memories of this game. It's pretty indicative of the age group here on HN. For reference, I'm 23. This was one of the greatest games ever made, no doubt. I've actually never been able to relate to a lot of my buddies who can game for hours on end. Starcraft, WoW, etc.. bore me after 30 minutes. Goldeneye on the other hand ... I could have easily died from starvation without the parental supervision. Anyhow, back to the original post. It's interesting to me that the original team had no idea what they were doing. I still look back on apps or things I built years ago, lacking absolutely any idea of what I was doing, and being amazed at how successful or great they ended up. Inversely, sometimes the product or thing I spent the most time agonizing over ended up being a total flop. More and more I am learning that you just gotta side with the majority of the 80/20, stick to your gut feelings, and jam jam jam to get that puppy out the door. It's always tricky to find that perfect place between being a bootstrapped/scaffolded/barebones MVP product and a well-thought out, carefully designed product. I'm glad the Rare team managed to hit it with Goldeneye, they're an inspiration.

Hannan 14y ago
>> It's pretty indicative of the age group here on HN. For reference, I'm 23. I'm not sure exactly what it says, but I'm a decade older than you, and I lost countless days to this game. The best opponent I had was four years older than me! I don't quite understand the love for the four player multi though. It seemed unplayably choppy to me with with that many opponents, but I never did get that expansion pack that sticks in the front. Also didn't care for the limited view range. But heads up multi-player... fantastic.
- smoyer 14y ago
  I'm another decade older and I lost countless lives playing this game ... My (then) 9th grade son, his friend and his friend's little sister consistently ended each life just seconds after it began!
- joshschreuder 14y ago
  Did the Expansion Pak [0] even work for games that didn't support it? From memory the game had to specifically support it or it didn't get used. I remember Perfect Dark (the spiritual successor to Goldeneye) required it to run most of the game. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expansion_Pak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expansi...

dhconnelly 14y ago

I enjoyed reading this until I reached the end: "I still have nightmares about playing Temple and not being able to find the proximity mines. If you like James Bond, lattes, startups and design, you'd enjoy my tweets." Talk about a non sequitur.

Jonanin 14y ago
Yeah, what the hell? I don't get why people beg for followers at the end of their blog posts. It just leaves a sour taste in my mouth after what would have been a great reading experience.
- benihana 14y ago
  >I don't get why people beg for followers at the end of their blog posts. You don't understand why people promote themselves? You made it to the end of the blog post, which likely indicates that you enjoyed the content. Why wouldn't he say "hey follow me on twitter so that if I write another post that doesn't make it to HN front page, you can hear about it," to try to get some extra followers? Would you prefer he ask you to follow him at the beginning of the post?
  - dhconnelly 14y ago
    There's a huge "Follow so-and-so" Twitter button immediately following the writing, so I'm pretty sure that the corny self-promotion didn't need to be part of the article itself. I read lots of articles where this happens, and it's always jarring.
    - robryan 14y ago
      The suggestion text has been shown to work better than just placing a button. Building up your personal brand can be worth a lot in the long run, so why not?
      - michaelgrafl 14y ago

alexkiwi 14y ago

Anyone interested in putting together a game in SF?

chadnickbok 14y ago
Yes, yes we are. Edit: And by that I mean you should take point and make it happen ;)

jivatmanx 14y ago

Proximity Mines under the ammo spawns. Invisible room in facility, entrance in Temple. Race to choose oddjob.

petitmiam 14y ago
Oddjob was banned pretty early on in my family.
- anthonyb 14y ago
  My house rules were "Pick any character you like, I'll kill you anyway" :)
function_seven 14y ago
I don't remember the Facility having an invisible room. I tried Googling, but don't see anything. Can you explain?
- defen 14y ago
  There was a bug that allowed you to get back up into the ventilation duct through which you enter the level (in single player mode). You have to go into the bathroom stall, crouch on the toilet, and spin around a few times IIRC. Once you're up there, no one's getting you out until you run out of ammo.
alexholehouse 14y ago
It was all about the race to the RCP90 on stack in multplayer - that white corridor of death...
- smokinjoe 14y ago
  My friends and I nicknamed that gun the "mow-down machine."
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
haha, I def remember having a "no oddjob" rule. And if you did pick oddjob, lord have mercy, cuz everyone was comin after your ass and nobody else! For whatever reason, I would irrationally target anyone playing as boris as well...

cloudwalking 14y ago

Temple in Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer game ever. Tangential to OP's article, http://console.fm http://console.fm is awesome.

alexkiwi 14y ago
Haha thank you, it's a really great project to work on.
- tejaswiy 14y ago
  This is brilliant. Thanks so much for doing an API! As much as I like web apps, I'd hate to keep a tab open for the entire day in my browser. I'll go build a simple native mac app that sits in the toolbar and plays music.
RandallBrown 14y ago
The Complex was a much better level than the temple in my opinion.
jrajav 14y ago
It is pretty awesome, I agree; but am I the only one for whom it doesn't work at all in Chrome?
whalesalad 14y ago
Perfect Dark was like a reskin of GoldenEye huh? That was awesome too. My cousins and I used to scare ourselves shitless by turning on bots to highest difficulty, giving them max speed and only tranquilizer guns. They'd still pwn you!

k-mcgrady 14y ago

I've never been a big gamer. I have a short attention span and lose interest too quickly, but I loved Goldeneye 64. The N64 was my first games console (I got it soon after it came out, I think I was 7 at the time) and Goldeneye was the game that was bundled with it. In general there were some great N64 games. The were the obvious ones like Super Mario, Mission Impossible was another good one, but my favourite was Diddy Kong Racing. It was the only game I've ever got 'addicted' too. The N64's also one of the few pieces of tech I've held on to. Every now and then I hook it up and get another few weeks of fun out of it.

DanBC 14y ago

I really loved the menu screen showing you what levels you'd done and what difficulty level you'd done them on. Simple, efficient. It took me weeks to realise that the cut-scene graphics were actually useful and not just fluff. They often provided hints and tips or let you know about enemies. There's a bunch of stuff still in the rom code that isn't accessible from the game - the hidden island; some glitchy levels. And there's some bits left over from the "notorious" but removed "put your face in the game" mode. (Which used the GB camera to map face photos onto game models for multiplayer but got removed after a mass shooting.) I loved the train; I loved the tunnel in the damn. I hated trying to keep the bloody hostages alive on the boat. The first few times I set the alarm off were scary. This was an amazing game. The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why.

nikatwork 14y ago
> The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why. That's arguably age-related nostalgia. I feel the same way about the Super Nintendo instead of the N64. http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1322 http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1322
- ekianjo 14y ago
  The N64 was a very poor system for games. You had a few very good ones and a lot of crap. The Playstation was a way more versatile system with great games in all genres. Hell, even the Saturn was more complete in terms of software.
  - lmm 14y ago
    The N64 had fewer games and more expensive than the competition, but the quality standard was far higher (there was a whole lot of unbelievably crap shovelware produced for playstation) and it was a more powerful system; the best N64 games (of which Goldeneye was certainly one) were by and large better than the best Playstation games. In "top 10 games of all time" lists the only Playstation game you tend to see is FFVII, which deserves its place but is more a triumph of storytelling than gameplay; from the N64 Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye both regularly feature. It was only towards the end of its life that we saw Playstation games comparable to those in technical terms (heck, while it's been overshadowed by later instalments I remember being blown away by Rogue Squadron back in '97 or so), and I don't think we ever saw the equal of Perfect Dark until the next console generation and Halo.

avar 14y ago

I'd be just as interested in how Rare went from doing Goldeneye 64 to making what seem to be relatively mediocre games today.

DanBC 14y ago
Pre MS buyout: GoldenEye 64, Blast Corps, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark. After MS buyout?
- throwaway1979 14y ago
  I really enjoyed Viva Piniata and Kameo! Both were extremely high quality. What is amazing about Viva Piniata was that my retired mom (afraid of turning on the computer) got interested seeing me play and started playing herself! She ended up unlocking every single feature/award in the game, and this led her to play other Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I got her the first iPad when it came out and she is now essentially a regular computer user! While Viva Piniata might not have been a commercial success, I know one life it changed and I'd bet there are a lot more. Frankly, I wish the world had more daring developers/game companies/people. The situation with Rare isn't a good one as your quip points out. Sadly, no matter how artistically awesome your games are, without commercial success, you cannot survive. This leads to a world of xbox games where pretty much every game is a shooter. IMHO, that is why tablets are kicking console gamings behind. It seems more creative titles for tablets (and perhaps the indie game section of xbox live) than for the xbox today.
NickPollard 14y ago
Much of the main talent who led the GoldenEye team at Rare (David Doak, Karl Hilton, Steve Ellis, Graeme Norgate) left to form their own studio, Free Radical Design[1]. FRD went on to release the Timesplitters games to good success, but later hit trouble and have now been bought out by CryTek and renamed CryTek UK. Martin Hollis, the other senior member of the team also left for pastures new after working on Perfect Dark. I'm sure Rare still has a lot of brilliant hard working team members, but the main drivers of GoldenEye have long since gone. [1] Disclaimer: I used to work at Free Radical at one point.

smokinjoe 14y ago

That game was in the top 5 N64 games sold, routinely hitting the top spot for roughly 3 years [and perhaps a little change]. It was an incredible run, I remember following it in EGM.

macspoofing 14y ago

It was still a bad idea to base your game on movie ip.

ae7 14y ago

I spent a ton of time playing this game as a kid. I remember the game being flawless as far as gameplay, and those were good times. Point: Maybe more mainstream games should be created by inexperienced teams to compete with the 6-month Call of Duty plot change cycle (i.e. same shit different day).

mweibel 14y ago

It's been such a great game, I lost countless hours as well. They redid the original Goldeneye for Wii and sadly I bought it. It's a horrible remake. Aiming with pointing using the Wii Remote is really hard and turning around takes ages, but this isn't the worst thing. They changed the multiplayer game mode: You can't pick up other weapons as you could in the 64 version - you have to chose in the beginning which weapons you'd like... I always loved this in the 64 version (proximity mines..oh yes :D)

doomlaser 14y ago

For those interested in more development anecdotes, the game's director did a full postmortem at this year's GDC Europe: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-GoldenEye.php http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-Gold...

bittersweet 14y ago

This article seemed very familiar, and I found the original article where a lot of the quotes/text came from, 'The Making of Goldeneye' from may 2011 [1] [1]: http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_goldeneye.html http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_golden...