It was one of the N64's biggest games, yet GoldenEye could have been very different if Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto had got his way...
NewsShooting the hats off unsuspecting guards. Clones of Robbie Coltrane and Sean Bean made entirely out of boxes. Running out of bullets and slapping your friends to death with your bare hands in multiplayer.
Yes, it's fair to say that Rare's GoldenEye 007 left its mark on a generation of console owners, with its seminal first-person shooters becoming one of the Nintendo 64's key games. Yet according to the game's designer Martin Hollis, speaking at the recent GameCity conference, GoldenEye could have been a very different game.
Hardly an obvious fit for Nintendo's family-friendly image, GoldenEye initially left the Big N's design legend Shigeru Miyamoto nonplussed - particularly in an early build of the game, where the flowing gore was akin to "that moment in The Shining where the lift doors open."
Having seen that early build, Miyamoto sent Rare, based in the UK, a fax which detailed his suggestions for the game.
"One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible," Hollis recalls of that communique. "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."
To take the bitter sting out of all that gunplay and bloodletting, Miyamoto had a decidedly quirky solution: have Bond visit the assorted henchmen and soldiers at the end of the game, all laid up and recovering from their bullet wounds and slap marks.
"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," Hollis said.
Needless to say, this isn't an idea that made it into the finished game. But the gore was toned down to almost non-existence in the released copy (though you can see a bit of blood in the GoldenEye's screenshots on the back of its box), and Hollis came up with his own way of reminding us all that it was all just make-believe: he re-introduced all the characters in an end-credits scene.
"The sequence told people that this was not real killing."
The result, of course, is one of the most beloved shooters of all time.
