GoldenEye on N64: Miyamoto wanted to tone down the killing

GoldenEye 007 was one of the greatest games of the 90s, and revolutionised the idea of the first-person shooter on consoles – but Nintendo was hugely concerned about its depiction of violence, game director Martin Hollis has revealed.

In a fascinating talk at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, the veteran designer explained how Twycross-based developer Rare was determined to forge a creative partnership with the Japanese company. After several approaches, the studio was finally visited by Genyo Takeda, the director behind the Punch-Out!! titles. “He went back to his hotel room, and when he came back for more meetings the next day, Rare had made a new version of Punch-Out!! over night, using their Silicon Graphics workstations and featuring huge rendered sprites. I imagine it impressed him a great deal.” A development deal was duly offered.

After producing the fighting game Killer Instinct, Rare was then offered the chance to make a game based around the GoldenEye movie, or “Bond 17” as it was known at the time. “Tim Stamper told me to write a design document,” says Hollis. “So I went away and thought about it for a month and wrote a ten-page document. And then I was making GoldenEye.”

According to Hollis, the game was originally much more graphic in its depiction of violence. “Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge. For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”

He went on to explain that, towards the end of development, the team received a fax from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, with a series of suggestions for the game. “One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible. I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”

Instead of this, Hollis added a credits sequence into the game, introducing all the characters, almost as though they were being portrayed by actors. “It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice,” he explained. “The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”

Hollis also admitted that the team borrowed the idea of having multiple objectives on each level from Super Mario 64. “I studiously tried to learn what Nintendo was. I played [Zelda] Link to the Past from beginning to end – I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Then Mario 64 came out during the development of GoldenEye and we were clearly influenced by that game. Ours was much more open as a result.”

Hollis spoke at length about his great admiration for Nintendo. “I value the idea – which I do see as quite strongly a Japanese idea – of respect to the player and trying to see into their mind and their life,” he said. “We have jargon for it nowadays: ‘user-centric design’. Nintendo thought about where the player would be when they played the game and who would be with them at the time.”

But it’s not just the players. Hollis argues that Nintendo also respects the creators, even when it might be financially detrimental. Apparently, Rare was asked if it would consider making a game based on the next James Bond film, but the studio turned it down. “I thought about this and was not sure I’d really want to,” said Hollis. “We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No’. We sent the message back, ‘The answer is no. We don’t plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film’. And that was it.”

Years later, Hollis still seems surprised at how easily Nintendo accepted their refusal. “It must have grossed, I don’t know, $400m or something. You might’ve thought that on a commercial basis someone at Nintendo, even lower down or higher up or whatever, would’ve said, “Well, are you sure?”, but out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it.”

Instead of making another James Bond game, Hollis moved on to work on Perfect Dark, which he says was “definitely a spiritual sequel”. While he left Rare 14 months into the game’s development, he was there for the important decisions.

“I wanted to make a game that starred a woman. Partly it was Nikita, the film by Luc Besson, and also Dishonored, a 1930s movie starring a spy who was a woman, and a general sort of sensibility that I thought it would be interesting to have a woman be the centre of attention. We constructed this character, to the very best of our ability, to be the centrepiece of the game.”

Joanna Dark was born of the best intentions – even her name comes from Jeanne D’Arc, or Joan of Arc – but her game inevitably made less of an impression than GoldenEye. If there are people who think Joanna Dark was less interesting than her male predecessor, Hollis has an explanation: “It’s very tough in a first-person shooter to develop a personality or a backstory, and what Bond brings you is honestly a lot more. You hear the theme tune and you’re right there.”

After briefly discussing the logistics of the GoldenEye development (it took a team of ten two and three-quarter years, and a budget of $2m), he was asked about how Nintendo managed to maintain its brilliance as a game development studio. Hollis said, “the secret of Nintendo is simple: always do good games”.