Five Fun Facts: Goldeneye 007
Some would say it single handedly revolutionized the FPS genre. It has some pretty neat backstory, too! Here are five interesting facts you may not know about Goldeneye 007:
1. It was developed by a very small and inexperienced team; eight of its ten developers had never previously worked on video games, and it was made in less than a year. Sometimes they would work 120 hours in a week to get this game done. Thats dedication.
2. The entire team expected the game to fail around launch, for a few reasons other than the fact that most of them had never made a game. Console first person shooters were actually unheard of at the time, so making one was a pretty risky move. Furthermore, it was a movie tie in game, and those don’t usually do too well. Embarrassingly, it even came out 2 years after the film itself, so it’s easy to see how every one thought the game was destined for failure. Yet, Goldeneye 007 went on to become the 3rd best selling game the Nintendo 64 had to offer ever, second only to Nintendo’s own Mario Kart 64 and Super Mario 64. Speaking of Super Mario 64, the idea of Goldeneye having multiple missions to complete within one level was inspired by the multiple objectives in Mario 64.
3. The game’s multiplayer mode was added very late in development as an afterthought. Almost all of the it was done by one guy who “sat in a room with all the code written for a single player game and turned GoldenEye into a multiplayer game.” The management didn’t even know he was doing it! The whole thing was made in about a month.
4. One thing that did not make it into the finished game was a unique weapon reloading system which consisted of unplugging and re-inserting the Rumble Pak on the Nintendo 64 controller, like the magazine of a gun. That would have been a good way to ruin controllers and rumble paks.
5. It was originally going to be an on rails shooter. Kind of like Sega’s Virtua Cop, except it wouldn’t have had a light gun. They also considered having an FPS mode and a rail shooter mode before deciding to go full on FPS. It was hard to decide because that early on in development they had no idea what the Nintendo 64’s controller was going to be like.