GoldenEye 007

1) "The Stamper brothers' talent had shined from an early age. Chris started tinkering with electronics as a young boy and eventually built his own computer in college. He got his first programming job—in arcade games—before he had even graduated. Meanwhile, Tim brought to the table an artistic eye and a knack for graphic design. Uncanny business sense combined with excellent creative instincts and big dreams had led the Stamper brothers to enormous success in their earliest days as a company, when they produced games under the trading name 'Ultimate Play the Game,' chosen because, in Tim's words, 'it was representative of our products: the ultimate games.' In May 1983, Ultimate's very first release—a 2D shooting platformer called Jetpac—hit it big on the ZX Spectrum home computer, selling 300,000 copies. Considering about one million people owned a Spectrum at the time, this was, in Chris's words, 'incredible penetration for a single product.' The Stampers worked insane hours to make this happen—eighteen-hour days, seven days per week. In fact, they only took off two days from work over the course of three years—both Christmas mornings."

2) "Brosnan's Bond was more technological than Dalton's or Craig's Bonds, and in GoldenEye, the bad guys weaponize information and surveillance technology, like Trevelyan's satellite or his security cameras in the bunker. It's no accident that you spend so much time in the game blowing up cameras and computers, the new enemies of the era. On the flipside, technical knowledge—like Natalya's computer expertise and the datathiefs and covert modems Bond uses to steal information in the game—proved particularly powerful in 1995. In this way, GoldenEye addressed concerns like, according to academic Martin Willis: 'What place is there for the human in an increasingly technological world? What power will technology wield in the future? What impact will global information and communication networks have on the continued prosperity of the nation-state?' Bond's bungee leap off the dam at the start of the film and game might as well be him diving into the unknown modern world. This tech dive persists until, in the final Brosnan film, Bond drives an invisible car like a superhero."

3) "Hollis told me that he based the delayed watch pause on the same four principles he always uses when making games: Is it fun? Is it funny? Is it self-consistent in the world of the game? and Is it fair?, meaning: 'When you die does it feel like it was your fault?' 'It doesn't have to seem fair straight away,' he told me. 'Sometimes I think it is okay if the player has to spend time and come to a realization that the game rule is fair. As one example, the random placement of the scientists in the gas plant push this rule a lot, but it is okay to play with the rules a little bit I think, and to worry the player on the hardest difficulty. The pause menu delay is highly unconventional, and is definitely pushing the issue of fairness. But once you know the rule, it does always feel like your fault when you die in that moment. You can imagine the game speaking to you softly, saying, 'You should not have paused then.'"

4) "The game's most controversial weapons weren't any of the powerful guns or the massive grenade launcher but rather the knives. The game's throwing knives inflicted a huge amount of damage in total silence and could be picked up and used again. 'We have throwing knives in the game because they're hilarious,' Doak told me, even though they aren't very Bondian per se. 'They were very nearly cut at the last moment because there was a tragic murder in Japan' involving a hunting knife, Doak added. The team received a fax from Nintendo asking them to take out the knives, arguing that a knife felt more offensive than a gun because it meant 'too much murder in the close distance'—an explanation that tickled the team. 'We just loved that phrase,' Doak told me, laughing. 'It became a phrase we would use. Murder in the far distance is great—knock yourself out all day long, but not murder in the close distance.'"

5) "The most famous of GoldenEye's scrapped design elements remains visible to players. The Dam mission is home to one of the game's most tantalizing mysteries—a distant island viewable through the sniper rifle's scope, impossible to get to but so seemingly intentional that it left a generation of gamers wondering. Botwood and Edmonds said they had originally been planning to add a boat that would allow you to get to the island to complete a mission objective. 'If I did it today I'd probably have a control for an open water outlet pipe that was blocking Bond's [bungee] jump there, so you'd have to go there to turn off the water,' Botwood speculated later. 'I think the original plan was to have a building over there to go and investigate, with armour as a reward. That would have meant a boat ride needed to be coded in, and some of the scenery had gaps when viewed from the island, so it was too much work.' Late in development, it was way more difficult to take something like the island out than to just leave it in, Hilton told me. Looking back on it now, Botwood considers the island a mistake. 'I should have never put it there,' he told me. 'It's a visual annoyance.' But messy things like the island add to GoldenEye's mythology—they add life to the world and give players something to theorize about, and are some of the best examples of the handcrafted quality of the game."

6) "The best example of how the team's inexperience benefited the final product is in their 'backwards' or 'anti' game design process. Today, much of the advice on FPS design says to start with objectives and work backward from there—tailor your level spaces to your objectives instead of building level architecture with no idea what will happen within that architecture. Instead, the team designed GoldenEye backwards—levels first and objectives second. When Hilton created the level spaces, he paid little to no attention to the player's starting place, exit point, mission objectives, or enemy location. All of that came later, with Doak and Botwood's work. 'The benefit of this sloppy, unplanned approach was that many of the levels in the game have a realistic and non-linear feel,' Hollis has said. 'There are rooms with no direct relevance to the level. There are multiple routes across the level. This is an anti-game design approach, frankly. It is inefficient because much of the level is unnecessary to the gameplay. But it contributes to a greater sense of freedom, and also realism. And in turn this sense of freedom and realism contributed enormously to the success of the game.'"

7) "After the cheats and bonus levels were added and GoldenEye was tested and scoured for bugs, it went through 'lot check,' a two-week process of playing the game to death on various types of televisions. In these final days, testers reported back a fairly serious problem: on one of the levels, (probably Frigate), if you played it in a certain order, the characters would appear with awful-looking textures due to a glitch in the game's dynamic memory system. In a single day, Hollis had to make a few particularly clever last-minute hacks to the ROM that would get it working with as minimal a touch as possible to the game's code. With that final eleventh-hour adjustment made, and without recompiling anything, Hollis sent the ROM back to Nintendo. GoldenEye was finally finished."

8) "In the end, the reimagining's updates only reveal what made the original so special. The 2010 game's shift from 'slappers only' to 'melee only' 'is almost the same [as the original],' one reviewer noted, 'but perhaps not as hilarious at three in the morning with three other slightly inebriated chums.' GoldenEye's goofiness—its messiness, even—is lost in a game as slick as the 2010 GoldenEye. The Daniel Craig stunt double and martial arts expert who did all the 2010 game's motion-capture acting contrasted sharply with Duncan Botwood in a smelly suit getting beat up by sweet British nerds. But 'bigger' isn't always better. You can feel it as you play the two: the 2010 GoldenEye was created by a corporation, and GoldenEye by human beings."