GoldenEye 007 (1997 Video Game) - Development

Development

GoldenEye 007 was developed by an inexperienced team; eight of its nine developers had never previously worked on video games. David Doak commented in 2004, "Looking back, there are things I'd be wary of attempting now, but as none of the people working on the code, graphics, and game design had worked on a game before, there was this joyful naïveté." Due to the success of Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007 was originally suggested as a 2D side-scrolling platformer for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but Martin Hollis, the director and producer of the game, proposed "a 3D shooting game" for Nintendo's in-development "Ultra 64" console.

The intention for the first few months of development was for the game to be an on-rails shooter similar to Sega's light gun game Virtua Cop; GoldenEye's gas plant location was modelled by Karl Hilton with a predetermined path in mind. Although GoldenEye is controlled with a pad rather than a light gun, Hollis credited Virtua Cop as an influence on the developers' adoption of features such as gun reloading, position-dependent hit reaction animations, penalties for killing innocent characters, and an alternate aiming system that is activated upon pressing the R button of the Nintendo 64 controller.

The development team visited the studios of the GoldenEye film to collect photographs and blueprints of the sets used in the movie. Silicon Graphics Onyx workstations and Nintendo's NINGEN development software were used to create the geometry for virtual environments based on this reference material. However, many of the missions were extended or modified to allow the player to participate in sequences which the film's James Bond did not. Hilton explained, "We tried to stick to for authenticity but we weren't afraid of adding to it to help the game design. It was very organic." Initially, the designers' priority was purely on the creation of interesting spaces; level design and balance considerations such as the placement of start and exit points, characters and objectives did not begin until this process was complete. According to Martin Hollis, "The benefit of this sloppy unplanned approach was that many of the levels in the game have a realistic and non-linear feel. There are rooms with no direct relevance to the level. There are multiple routes across the level." Hollis also noted that the concept of several varied objectives within each mission was inspired by the multiple tasks in each stage of Super Mario 64, a game whose 3D collision detection system was also influential for Hollis.

Final N64 specifications and development workstations were not initially available to Rare: a modified Sega Saturn controller was used for some early playtesting, and the developers had to estimate what the finalised console's capabilities would be. The final Nintendo 64 hardware could render polygons faster than the SGI Onyx workstations they had been using, but the game's textures had to be cut down by half. Karl Hilton explained one method of improving the game's performance: "A lot of GoldenEye is in black and white. RGB colour textures cost a lot more in terms of processing power. You could do double the resolution if you used greyscale, so a lot was done like that. If I needed a bit of colour, I'd add it in the vertex." At one time, developers planned to implement the reloading of the weapons by the player unplugging and re-inserting the Rumble Pak on the Nintendo 64 controller, though this idea was discarded at Nintendo's behest.

GoldenEye 007 introduced stealth elements not seen in previous FPS games. David Doak, one of the game's programmers, explained how this was implemented: "Whenever you fired a gun, it had a radius test and alerted the non-player characters within that radius. If you fired the same gun again within a certain amount of time, it did a larger radius test and I think there was a third even larger radius after that. It meant if you found one guy and shot him in the head and then didn’t fire again, the timer would reset."

Rather than trying to release the game in tandem with the movie, the Stamper brothers made sure to give the team as much time as they needed. It was developed through two and a half years, the first year of which was spent developing the engine and producing art assets. The game's multiplayer mode was added late in the development process; Martin Hollis described it as "a complete afterthought". According to David Doak, the majority of the work on the multiplayer mode was done by Steve Ellis, who "sat in a room with all the code written for a single-player game and turned GoldenEye into a multiplayer game." The game was released on 25 August 1997, nearly two years after the film. The game's cartridge size was 96 Mb (12 MB). In addition to the Nintendo 64 game, a racing version was in development for the Virtual Boy, but was eventually cancelled before release.