GoldenEye 007 sequels turned down, Miyamoto’s hand shakes revealed in new interview

The more we learn about the development of Goldeneye 007 as time goes on it seems more and more like a miracle it was even created.

Today that becomes one step closer to reality with some new details revealed about its development in a new interview with the games designer Martin Hollis.

Speaking at the GameCity festival in the UK, Hollis has brought up some new information about how the game came to be. Nintendo gave Rare the opportunity make a Goldeneye game after finishing Killer Instinct. Hollis recounts ‘Tim Stamper told me to write a design document. So I went away and thought about it for a month and wrote a ten-page document. And then I was making GoldenEye.’

This Goldeneye though was going to far more violent than it ended up being, ‘Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge’. The games famous ‘paint splotch’ blood was to be far more graphic, ‘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.’

This naturally didn’t go down well with Nintendo.

As the game was wrapping up Shigeru Miyamoto stepped in with some 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.’ Obviously that never happened, Hollis instead added the credits sequence to game showing off the characters – not quite as friendly as a handshake.

So after how well Goldeneye 007 actually ended up doing surely a sequel was on the card? We all know Perfect Dark eventually came about but Nintendo first asked Rare if they wanted to do another Bond game. ‘I thought about this and was not sure I’d really want to. We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, ‘No’ said Hollis. ‘The answer is no. We don’t plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film’. And that was it.” Hollis was surprised that Nintendo accepted their refusal so easily.

‘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.’

The rest of the interview can be read over at The Guardian, its well worth the read.