Classic Postmortem: GoldenEye 007

[Music] hello and welcome to the gold night double-o seven post mortem first I'd like to present my credentials I started making games when I was 12 on the abit BBC microcomputer this was as a hobbyist and I would write in two magazines with games and they would print them for people to type in which is fairly incredible today but a good way to learn programming after university I was lucky enough to get a job at rare as a first place as a programmer on killer instinct this was a very hectic short by my standards project of one year we had to bring an

operating system and a new computer essentially was designed inside rare by Chris Stamper and peacocks from the ground up it was a thrilling project after this I was twiddling my thumbs in the stable block where the killer instinct team was working wondering what I'd be doing next but my most important credential is this video that I made when I was a child [Music]

[Applause] thank you I'm full credit where credit's chew that was a team effort with me and my two brothers my youngest was actually the star I never felt most comfortable in front of the camera I was on piano and my middle brother was pulling down the gel so you know it's an example of how you need to pull together several technical effects to achieve the design result now the beginning of Goldeneye is a bit of a strange story as I understand it rare was approached by Nintendo and asked if they would be interested in making a game for the

upcoming Bond film which didn't have a title at that time only a number and I assume there was some miscommunication or at least it was a gray area at that time there are essentially two large teams that rare one I'd finished Donkey Kong Country recently about 18 people and the other had finished killer instinct coin-op that was about 10 maybe 11 people there was a little bit of a competitive spirit between these two teams but Tim Stamper who was one of the directors of the company was very much on me Donkey Kong Country team and that was his brainchild that game and he went down to he went down to leave Stern where the film was going to be short for a press junket they were promoting the

new film all the big stars were there I didn't know anything about this at the time his a his a scan from some of the subsequent publicity from that visit and here is a picture of very rare I have to say photograph of Tim Stamper who also schemed this button on the left here with the art director of gold my Andrew Ackland snow gold neither movie this is and it says I don't know if you can see this Tim Stamper who will design the Super NES game here's a photograph inside rare with the very large supercomputer called challenger in the end it was 20 processors and it was awesome in that could do a great mouth rendering but not

so good in that I had to reboot it every young every day or sometimes even three times a day so this is kind of a just kind of a funny of start Tim Stamper decided not to make the film Greg males on Donkey Kong Country who's I guess you would say lead designer on Donkey Kong Country wasn't that impressed so they decided to pass I heard about this as a rumor and I said to Tim Stamper that this sounds cool like I'd like to make this game and he said ok and that was that was pretty much my pitch I don't really know and I can't really explain why they had trust in me after simply being second programmer on killer

instinct but I'm delighted and honored that they did at that time I was beginning to be involved in the hiring and I hired my first ever interview II was Mark Edmonds this was January 1995 and he's someone you don't hear too much about from the Gold 9 team I don't know if you ever have noticed that weird thing that happens on one of the screens which is a very tall person walking like this you can just about make it out that's the only presence of Mark Evans in the game most of the team members were in the game myself included were in the game as a face on one of the characters that would be randomly

generated all that was scripted but mark might preferred not to be so in the in the course of putting together my talk I asked all of the Goldeneye team if they had anything to say about the making of Goldeneye I had great pleasure I'm talking to each of them mark I asked the first question I asked him was what was it like working at rare and he was a very quiet humble guy and he said this in the nicest possible way he said it was work lunch work suffer play games for a bit work sleep repeat and you know for mark and myself it was a two-year eight-month project and about a thousand days it was it was a long project in the

beginning we were probably working we were probably working ten hours a day but by the end I'm far in excess of that there was no such thing as an n64 the name before was ultra 64 and the name for that was project reality but circa the beginning of this project it was called the ultra 64 and the closest thing to it was this Onix Silicon Graphics Onix which I think the list price was about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars this is a no you can see it's a very large box it wouldn't fit under every desk and it emitted huge amounts of heat for graphics cards and it was not that reliable frankly like all the SGI machines if you pay that much money for something you know it's

it's not going to be all that reliable and this was marks this was marks computer and he set about at the beginning working on the pipeline for the game trying to get a character on the screen trying to make do with what I mean we knew it wasn't going to be able to do very many polygons and we wanted lots of characters on screen so trying to make a character four-sided arms guru shading that was the first piece of graphics I ever saw on you know gray shaded no texture no artist one of the major themes I want to pull out from this that I was thinking about a lot when I was putting this together was to what extent does it make sense to talk about a game or making a game as a as an

endeavor led by one person I find it's a very interesting question I'm in love with movies as well as games obviously but I love movies and I consider myself a film buff and from from the French critical theory around the time of Truffaut etc they had this idea of auteur theory which is the idea that there was one author of the work and that was Francois Truffaut or whatever now this you know we looked films perhaps too often films were looking to gain to our films were looking to books and you know this was the idea that had an author wrote a book and no toy is my way of saying well you know myth maybe it's not like that at all maybe it's a totally collaborative

process well when it works well and there's no one Authority and there's no one author so this is one of the things I want to pull out recently I found some paper from the Goldeneye project I originally thought I had nothing but I'm going to show you for the first time about ten pages of very very early documents that I put together which all materials that I have this is my jottings the date on this can't be right it says 94 it must be 95 February 95 and I was wondering to myself the two I think Tim very important questions for this game what's the appropriate level of humor and what's the appropriate level of violence this is a list of

questions mainly which is a good start to any project I suppose can we get footage can we use the actual music come use a title sequence can we - likenesses can we use material from other Bond films can we get photos of props costumes etc a bit of a list so I was wondering all this and actually in a communication I made this clear turn in Tendo and they were good enough to send back an extremely detailed document explaining everything we could use which was an astonishing amount we're very lucky to have such a broad license so these are my thoughts at the same time in my mind was virtual cop and doom on the ultra 64 as it was called no gun I'd also been playing a lot of time crisis and together with Mark and you know I could see the value of having a gun in your

hand but there was no gun planned for the n64 at this time we had no control or no idea what the control would be like at all so there was no there was no certainty but there was a rumor that there was going to be a analog stick and that was all I knew so I was pondering with the analog joypad be okay is it okay to shoot lots of people I don't think I actually put that question to management or to Nintendo if I had they probably said no it was very much in my mind that bond wasn't I mean you know he does kill people he does have a license to kill but it's not a gorefest it's not an incredibly violent game it's not an incredibly violent universe so

you know this is very much in my mind talking here about Street Fighter is less violent than Virtua cop which is less violent than doom which is less violent than Pulp Fiction is an adventure aspect a good idea gets the camera route fixed model destructions crucial character motions we fixed can we use the likeness of Pierce Brosnan maybe to play a corporate ear for bigger idea legal can we use the Walther PPK and down the bottom I'm just starting to talk about the schedule is it one programmer 2 artist to two other artists are you know that's very much think of a small member of program as a large number of artists controls aim shoot dive left-right advanced retreat you know these these are all ideas and then Tim asked me to produce a a formal document so that I could show the management of rare what I

was thinking so I produced this this is April 1995 couple of months later slightly drawing back my scope focusing more on virtual cop which is obviously a simpler game to make large number of character types more moves and virtual cop for each character this was all comparing it to virtual pot more intelligent characters this is where it starts to diverge so this is suggesting that we spend much more effort on the artificial intelligence all characters will try to survive but in addition they might be trying to reach an alarm switch rescue their comrade obey an order play dead hide under a table or reach an exit wouldn't it be awesome if a character tried to hide under a table in the first person shoes I'd I've never seen that yet a large range of objects more users

for each object more interesting 3d backgrounds you know all really kind of had the thought of missions if it's so well in with bond but not the idea of five per level or anything like that talking about more and less covert missions your bomb storming a train or escape from a building with unsilenced weapons against stiffer opposition the violence will be low-key I say down the bottom so I've returned just behavior will not be encouraged control you know you can't really say too much about this this whole paragraph isn't maybe it'll be like this maybe it'll be like that we didn't have hardware we didn't know realism I I knew that it shouldn't be totally realistic had to feel a little bit realistic well but what I had in mind is a kind of film realism which is a silly realism on the surface it looks real for

this got bizarre rules you know like cars explode the instant you tap against someone or you know all the enemies have awful aim which is the famous in the stormtroopers so I had this kind of idea of filming filming realism film physics bullets leaving their mark on the walls around the level I think that that level of interactivity you know pretty much all you have is the gun and the more the gun can do and reach out to the environment and feedback to you that stuff is happening the better multiple option I was talking about a link out between two consoles thank goodness we didn't so this is a list of levels which is kind of two-thirds how it came out we had actually we put down not the

second level as the first level in the end we have seven err are twice as I thought that worked out our fav oh I find wrote six six levels here at the end era they bow so I guess you know I wanted there to be a goodly number of levels but I didn't feel there was quite enough material in the film so trying to pull out more and more from the film to you know make make a substantial game you know here I'm here I'm talking through the possibility of missions on on each level I listed the weapons and looking back this is very naive this list because it's so ambitious you know I've got a sniper's rifle with a site in this list

and the game the game wasn't supposed to take nearly three years to make but you can already see the degree of ambition within me and also within the team in this document various gadgets MQ wouldn't ever been great to have Moneypenny it was not to be now this is an interesting list this is a visual effects which I felt was fit to dedicate a page to in this short document muzzle flashes ricochets cartridge cases ejected from guns wounds sparks from cute equipment flames smoke day and night gas escaping seeing Lake Effect's mirror and glass reflections again

really quite ambitious for what was supposed to be a short project so in terms of material from the film we have very little to begin with we had an early shooting script which was lovely to thumb through whom ana.k us a lot of information about what they were planning in the film but we didn't know what they were actually going to shoot before too long we were informed of their shooting schedule and we were invited to go along to collect photographic material and this is our copy of the document they said you can see I put a question mark on statue park there wondering if it was going to make it as a level and if it was worth a visit to the film set but all of us were very privileged to be offered to go and see the film set and you see a photograph twitch you know perhaps the director Martin Campbell

might have preferred to have a quieter set but he was a great item Norma's pleasure knows our norms helped to making the game so closely follow the film so the next higher to the team was Carl Hilton and Carl said to me it was great to go down to the sets that leaves done and take photos of all the different locations he also was a Bond fan almost all the team we were all Bond fans selection effect it was so you know it was a project that personally interested all of us at the end here he said for me 32 by 32 RGB 64 by 64 tint the n64 did not have a large texture cache and one of Carl's bugbears and one of his very tight constraints was the size of the textures he had to make and most of the

textures were 32 by 32 many of them could be as large as 64 by 64 and now you know nowadays I've never actually seen but I'm sure there's textures that a twelve megabytes which is as large as the whole ROM on gold night you know nowadays you the smallest iPod you get his two gigabytes which is hundred more times larger than the entire Goldeneye ROM so people have very strict constraints to work to this is Carl as a scientist being Big Shot for no reason and you can see the texture in the background there's really not that many that many pixels there so Carl was good enough to send me some of his heart

work that was from his desk Fiske it's a funny you know how how relaxed we were this is his his list of what levels were definite he's written here again another texture size and another one at the top 64 line you can tell what was on his mind this is his plan for silo version one at the bottom here that's the level with halls house and was one of the very first levels that was modeled we actually showed that at Shawshank I on video only form with a mock-up it wasn't a playable game at all it was a mock-up with handcrafted cameras blinds and then all the audio was added in afterwards so

there's a thus a more modern reverse engineered image of the silo level that's not contemporary just to give you an idea this is Karla textures now you know as we got through the levels we've got a little bit more sophisticated this is some petersburg version 3 on the right here but really as I as Carl put it it's not the art of Prometheus you couldn't put this together in a coffee table book but this is pretty much all the paper that we used during the development of the game really what we were focusing on was the tools on the

SGI machines that we had looking at the screen they're resizing the window down to 320 240 to try and simulate what the old 64 would be like me Jones was the next hire she was an artist and was responsible for many things but chiefly or all the characters I asked her you know what was the what was the work you did that you've most proud of and there's a bit of a tease but the answer was building the for James Bond's each one was different Roger has a white tux Shawn had a double-breasted jacket and Tim had an open tux I was very pleased with the likenesses but I guess you'll just have to believe me sorry about that this is

another piece of work that B did which was for the promotion of the game this was done actually once the game was finished and she had a little bit more free time first designer on the project was Duncan Bach would he he said to me that he was most proud of a multiplayer mode steve coded it in a month which was the work of a magician while I set up the spawning weapon and ammo points mrs. Duncan talking and cut the level backgrounds down to a quarter of their poly count then made new backgrounds when we didn't have enough variety Carl contributed some fantastically complex environments as well which meant I had to go back and do better texturing on the ones I had made you know on a small team like this there's so many jobs it's impossible to explain what it what each person did comprehensively so I can only

give you a tiny indication in a one-hour talk Steve Ellis was a mention programmer who did the multiplayer and many other things he said one of the things that always strikes me as crazy in retrospect is until sometime like March or April of 1997 so that's two years after we'd begun there wasn't a multiplayer mode at all hadn't even been started it really was put in at the last minute something you wouldn't dream of in these days and it was done without the knowledge or permission of the management too rare a Nintendo sorry management a rare a Nintendo the first thing they knew about it was when we showed it to them working however since the game was already late by that time if we haven't done it that way probably would never have happened and I suppose there's quite a few features that we snuck in and it was only possible because of the fact that

the management trusted us you know they believed in the team and you know they weren't they weren't coming in even every week you know I'm sure there was a six-month stretches where no member of rare or Nintendo management came in to the team offices which is really quite extraordinary and all credit to them that they felt able to take that much of a Leanback approach and place that much trust in a team all the people on the team had never made a game before except for myself and ad Smith so a lot of trust down grain nor gate was one of three audio people on the project Graham was involved for extremely long stretch

of the project and responsible for all the sound effects one of the fascinating things about the sounds when you actually shoot in Goldeneye and you hit something something like seven eight or nine sound effects will actually trigger so much effort was put into the various permutations and combinations and the randomness in the sound effects to try and give a punch and a pleasant tactile sensation and you know the reward yes I either game no you're hitting this I know you're hitting I know you're hitting the other so enormous amount of effort went into polishing compressing you know iterating iterating iterating on those sounds and you know Graham did all of that but he was also a composer and he wrote half of them using something like forty or fifty

pieces of music in the entire game which is an incredible feat not least because of the measly budget I gave them to fit all of the sound effects all of the instrument facts and all of the MIDI music on the wrong this is the famous David dope he was seconded last designer to join the team this is him as a scientist he was unusual we had a great piece of good luck he was actually a biochemist his PhD was in biochemistry before he before I hired him to rare to actually be a system administrator for rare so after a while I'm talking to him you know we had a great relationship and I felt that he had been an awesome

addition to the team I'm so glad I made that choice um who's you unquestionably one of the best FES designers in the world this is Dave dhoka myself being silly you know the team had to produce you know we we scratched for what photographic materials we could get but there's very little in the way of faces of the actors even even the bit parts even even pierce brosnan so it was like magazines and we found a picture of jaws it was about this big in some magazine so yeah of course crazy here we are we're dressing out to provide silhouettes for the video screens in 7 a.m. bunker this is actually a later picture from near the end what I've got in my hand there is the mock-up of the box art for

the product that was produced by Nintendo they sent it to us we printed it out on one of the few color printers in the company and I folded it together to make a simulation of what the box would look like one of the things I'd like to talk about in Goldeneye that I think isn't spoken about enough is humor there's a lot of things that happen in there some were intentional some not so intentional but I think all of them great addition to the game there helped to make you laugh any any first-person shooter and almost any game is a series of hills and valleys of tension you know you go around the corner maybe there's a guy there oh there isn't you go into another corner no guy oh I hear some shooting over there come

around a corner three guys bang bang so it's that's ramping up the tension but to bring it down again it's more difficult and humans incredibly important for that and you know that helps to bring the valleys in and to make the to give the level of structure and emotional structure which is really important for people's people's reward because people are base emotional animals so you know if it's not really realistic it was it was kind of cool maja mark was very pleased the first time he got the watch to come up on the screen but you know really it's it's a little bit silly and the explosions there's another example of humor because for reasons I still don't understand

when there's an explosion it's kind of a crediting effect and the software credits the momentum to the nearby enemies and when it reaches a certain amount they fly off so what you happen is there's an explosion people are there like this slightly too long and then they fly off into the air and it is very very funny and you know I by rights I should have been sick of the game by the end of 2 and 2/3 years but I derived a great deal of satisfaction from just you know lobbying around a few few minds blowing out people watching them cascade around you know the silly there's an argument that we could have had more quality control and we can say yeah you know what let's not have the Moonraker outfits they're a bit silly but instead you know

be made it and it went in this it is silly but it's also great yeah thus laughing oh how did nobody ever said on the team no one ever said this this is ridiculous it was one of a very very long list of things you know we wanted it we implemented it it seemed okay we move on you know we it's it's absolutely hilarious and I love it but again you could make an argument that it should be different more realistic much more sober and I think you'd be taking out a lot of character of the game the toilets yeah the English and Japanese found humor in the talk so you know overall you know what I what I love to try and put into a game is a sense of humor you know I think people want to have fun and a part

of that is laughter but also any game it's presents a challenge it can become become tiresome the frustration can become overbearing the more humor you can get in there the better and a lot of it is going to be serendipity it's going to be things you do that you didn't plan on what they turn out to be a little bit silly and if you can if you can leave those and the teams comfortable to leave them that's correct next thing I want to talk about is mistakes I like things that by rights are really truly a mistake in game design I guess some of you might know I'm probably the biggest one is odd-job have really anxiety in you know odd job was an annoying character in multiplayer because it's very hard to shoot because he was so short and you could certainly

make an irony should never have been in the game that it be a better game without him some you know one of your friends is going to choose all job it's a cheesy thing to do and it spoils the game but to me that's a social dynamics problem you should be putting pressure on your friend to not be a cheater but fearful of people have redefined this as you know our job is what the cheater picks and I think that's a beautiful solution to what could be said it was under balancing we didn't have time to bounce all the characters really we just threw them in for the multiplayer but you know these little these little quirks and bits of sketchiness I really strongly feel I bring personality to the game another one of the things that I personally feel so proud about the game

is kind of sandbox nature it's not it's not really it's not really a sandbox game but many of the levels are linear and many of them you you you have a little bit of choice you know you could do the missions in this order all that order but really you know is you can't really say it's the sandbox game but there's there's a there's a sandbox a way to play it and that's when you don't care about the missions anymore when he played it enough and you just want to mess around with with the guys and you know my personal fave I spent I remember well six hours one evening playing and playing in in the bunker drawing in more of the infinite forn enemies and shooting their hats off six hours and I had I had like a massive collection of hats on the ground and you

could shoot them I don't know if you ever know this you can shoot them you can get them up in the air you can juggle the hats you can chew them at Calculon party you can see you know that that is a really pleasurable thing and it's something that came out of the game development totally organically nobody ever said you know let's make it so they you know so that you can shoot the house in the air for six hours it would have been a ridiculous statement but you know what we did say was that's a kind of funny why don't we have some hats and the rest was mark Edmonds execution now one stage we did have some much more violent effects in the game we have one texture long animated texture new masses of blood so when you shoot it was made me feel you know I consider myself to

have a strong stomach made me feel a little bit uncomfortable seeing this in glorious 3d you know Howard Lincoln came round one time and he was he saw one of our animations which was to shoot someone in the groin and they then would ride around on the ground for it seemed like it must have been less than two minutes but seemed like forever that they were there writhing around on the ground and it had a humor value but really it was too too violent you know and we'd we took out the the flip book texture or incredibly bloody we toned down the hits so there really quite subtle on the bodies that you know they are read the characters disappear after you have shot them totally not realistic but it kind of underlines the fact that you shouldn't really care about them that you know you shouldn't feel bad about shooting them

it makes it easier to to play a game which is you know like any FPS it is essentially about killing a long long series of Fievel and I have to say the graphics which today looks so blocky and awkward you know even in the day they were a little you know the shape of the head it wasn't it's a little bit you know can't we do better than this but that non-realism in the graphics was actually a big help to making it a more light game and more in touch with the Bond universe so grant kirkhope was the other main composer on the project he's also a guitarist and he did the guitar riffs on the some of the more electric rock versions of the gold my Monte

Norman piece grant said to me I wish I had added longer tunes for the game I remember asking mr. Hollis how long I should make the chains as I was completely new to games and I had no idea I remember him saying that he thought a minute would be sufficient and quickly went back to his business and dismissed me I'll try to know that you could spend forever running around levels hearing the same tune over and over and over again thanks Martin sorry sorry gran Robin beans and was the third to compose the the music guys were the only people who are out of the team building you know the the audio team was all together and rare was privileged to have these three guys who were incredibly untalented musicians composers from the professional world rather than games design plus what rather than game development per se Ron

Wieland only wrote one piece of music which was the elevator music which you can hear in such levels as the the complex and the caves this is just a little joke but I'm very interested to Adrian Smith was the third and last artist he said to me I was particularly pleased with the effects I produce for the game the muzzle flashes the trace of fire in the explosions we're very influenced with the film heat I was very pleased to the end sequence of the blood coming down the screen I wish I had copyrighted the watch graphics as a mechanic for the status for health indicator mentioned Stephen Ellis so here's a his a nice shot of the multiplayer this is actually running on an emulator if you blow up the n64 screen on a big screen like this

you know ntsc was the major limiting factor it's really not in the in the actual bandwidth for ntsc but you know this is one of the things that I feel is held at least well about the game is is the sharpness I asked Adrian what he what he wish had he put in to the game and he said the firing range this is something he actually modeled it was an environment from q-branch it would have been great if it was added and incorporated with some minigames well that was one of the very few things that we didn't get around to actually getting in but it came true with perfect dark so you know by this point we had the entire team assembled and you we're in the homestretch I I have to admit that I don't remember any talk of deadlines or schedules which is completely astounding

you know I assume that as lead on the project I was told what the deadline was probably several times but I was so focused on what what could be done to make the game better that you know today this isn't in my mind at all now this is actually a graph by Ben cousins that he sent round on Twitter recently to try and educate people who don't know game development how quickly your game will actually develop what you think will happen is you think linearly your game will get better half way through you'll think you'll have half a game it's not the case at all halfway through you basically don't have anything you don't have a game so halfway through goldeneye you know we did have a game and i remember sitting

in the office with mark Edmunds and he said you know come and have a go I had a go and I just remember not really feeling anything and I didn't say anything and I just I guess my faith said everything yeah it was it was absolutely diabolical it was in the bunker in the interior the movement was completely dead the sound effects are completely dead the gun was dead on the screen and it had no no reaction no movement there was no auto aim it was a crosshair you know you had to line up perfectly was completely no no juice at all in the game and you know essentially it took circa a year to add a layer on layer on layer of little movements little sounds little reactive effects graphical effects on textures when you shoot little glimpse on the gun you

layer upon layer upon layer of little effects just to try and make it feel more more punchy and more like the game was actually listening to what you were doing and in this final year we were working so hard I I can't remember it at all so I have almost met what to say about that new the homestretch the game was finished we were able to add little little sprinkles little additions things that were just nice to have like the like the cheats you know Steve Ellis programmed these we just had a great discussion in the office all you know what yeah that would be cool yeah why don't we have big heads like Donkey Kong Country you know that'll be funny tiny bombs yeah that's amusing and you know we added it gathered cheese and just I think we had seventeen it was

just the number we could think of that we thought would call a little bit of an intro and an outro on the game this is a joke referencing the BBFC their film review board in the UK and this is my signature at the bottom left and my attempt to do to write James Bond how he would sign it there yeah I mean all this was added right at the end at this point we finally had a full complement of levels 18 from the Goldeneye movie and two extra bonus from other films you know a little story about the the balancing on that you Dave doke and I played the Aztec after he had set it up and we both found it very hard on

double-o but you've given a couple of hours we could both we could both do it and then being a mischievous pair that we were I said to him okay that's good now why don't you just make it a little bit harder so a snake is just slightly harder than we were able to do ourselves at the time and it's in my if I give Li the hardest level in the game on double-o but I still get a great deal of satisfaction from playing Hilter I can't be frustrating at times so Mark had a little story points out to me that I've forgotten about which was the craziest coolest thing we finished the game it had been through tests you know we'd marked off all the bugs everything was good they'd send it through lot check words there's a long process where they play

the game to death for like two weeks and tested on all the combinations of televisions and so on and then he came back and there was a problem on one of the levels when he played it in a certain order it's probably the frigate feeling so an order very certain sequence of characters being instantiated and they'd have terrible texture maps on them because there wasn't enough memory had a dynamic memory system which is I mean it worked okay most of the time but memory is very tight on this level so what I had to do was right in order to make a minimum change and the version control system wasn't that reliable in order to make a minimum change that day I wrote at all to extract the code and the data for the code from the ROM it was gzipped so basically a custom on Jie Jie I wrote

that adjusted the memory numbers rajee's appear whopped it back into the ROM image without recompiling everything anything and sent it to a Nintendo so that's the final version and mark says thankfully it worked and it still makes me smile it's kind of I don't know I don't know if it was the best way to do that or not to this day but it was it was a minimum change and it worked another little story from the final days which was the crates used to say vodka on them which is Russian for vodka unfortunately pretty late on Nintendo noticed they have who spoke Russian and said yeah but mine large almost all the

things we wanted to get into the game were we were able to fit them in with no resistance from rare management or Nintendo or even eon and Don Jack who are the production company that made the movies and the licensed controlling company so you know I'd like to say thank you to all of those people for allowing us to realize our vision and then the game was finished and I guess it was a tiny bit of an anti-climax but there was a certain amount of pleasure you know being able to being able to look at things that nearly three years before had just been a few words you saying the dam would have three towers and now you know being able to enjoy mm-hmm enjoy our work mark Edmund says I remember Tim asking shortly after we had finished what I would raid the game I

think I said seven out of ten so there must have been a lot of areas I still thought could have been improved even back then and I think that sums up how all of us felt about about the game we didn't really know whether it was awesome or whether it was okay or whether it would you know fall on deaf ears in the marketplace because the film had been a long time ago and you know to our eyes the graphics on the levels we've made first were not as good as the graphics on the levels we'd made last so there's a lot of questions in our minds this is the closest thing I've got to a gold my team photos is not the gold my team this is part of the perfect dark team from left to right we've got Steve Alice Graham nor gate mark Edmonds that's Ross Murray who was perfect dark only Karl Hilton David dog myself Pete Jones and Lee ray who was also perfect dark only

so Oh - oh no - in my opinion is that it's really quite toxic to go into making a game with the idea that one person is going to be giving all the orders and telling everybody what to do I think that's absolutely the worst way to go about making a game and I tried yeah and I always try but I tried on this project to as much as possible have a flat management structure and have it so the people could implement their own feed shows if they felt like it and people could similarly contribute whatever it was that they wanted my chief concern in the early days was to simply direct a ship in what seemed like a good direction and make sure I had the

best possible crew and the thing is when you work with incredibly intelligent people they they reward you know your trust in them and the most rewarding thing for them is their autonomy and that means not telling them what to do so really you know my take home for this talk is les you can be a boss the less you can be telling everybody what to do the better the likely results auteur no tour I think it's a false dichotomy really I think the best games you do have an element of personal an element of personal authorship but you really need that very early in the project before the team is really a team at all because if you're trying to steer a team

around and they're great people they're going to resist you and it's going to have an emotional cost on both sides so really I think the best thing is just just a couple of drops of yourself in a project and after that everybody collaborating Adrian Smith said it best to me he said everybody contributed to the game in their own way which made it the success that it became nobody needs to be singled out it was a team that made gold Knight just like say thank you for the gold my team with their help with this talk [Applause]

I've also been asked to remind you to fill out your mobile evaluations thank you very much I'm happy to take questions although I talked for what's also lunchtime at the 4th floor so questions it's fine too okay a lot of people fight about first-person shooters on consoles versus PC like mouse keyboard and all that stuff how do you feel that even now so many years after Goldeneye came out when people talk about whether or not shooters can work on consoles they still mentioned Goldeneye oh they do that's cool um how do I feel that people still mention Goldeneye when debating whether first-person shooters can work on console versus PC I mean to me it seems

a little bit sad some of the acrimony between the two camps the you know PC is the one true way camp and the console camp I think I think they're both you know you can make awesome awesome games on either you know people will say well the analog the little analog stick it's not so accurate it's not as accurate as a mouse but to me it's like saying in golf why do you just pick up the ball and put it in the hole you know I mean the game comes every game comes with its own constraint and playing the game you you live inside those constraints and they they make the game so it's kind of a strange thing to say to me PC is designed for spreadsheet software it's incredible really that you can make such an awesome game on it only other hand consoles they have the price pressure but at least they're designed dedicated

for games you know I never felt any need for a divide between PCs and consoles I never thought oh we can't make a great game because doom or no or anything like that I was always thinking well you know let's let's go for this I think it's also if people still mention gold night I mean at the time it was the best-selling FPS that's a great privilege and honor we've had a huge amount of work into making it as crazy could be in us it's lovely to be invited back to to talks you know is pretty much 15 years slightly over 15 years since it came out did you play the well let's call it remake that came out recently and what

do you think about the new iteration of Goldeneye I played eurocom Activision's remake a little bit honestly not that much I thought I thought that it is really close to a Call of Duty more in its gameplay and the rhythm of the enemies the rhythm with which they come to you the way you approach them you know and and in many other ways although graphically I could see they put a huge amount of work into trying to be true to Goldeneye double-oh-seven on the n64 you know I think it's it's actually very difficult to analyze a game it's actually very difficult to see what's in there I think it's actually very difficult to replicate that so yeah I enjoyed playing it maybe they were

trying to cater to the marketplace today more and very different I mean if that was my job I I don't know that I would say no make it just like the original yeah it's very difficult because there aren't really games in the marketplace today that have that plate-spinning thing where you you have like three guards and you shoot one that keeps him busy shoot the next keeps him busy shoot the next keeps him busy then you go back to the first one again you know that there's lots of little mechanics like that in gold Knight to do with the second to second and quarter second two core second interactions between you and the guards yeah even stuff like the bunny hop they do it's so silly but it makes a big difference to the business of actually trying to shoot them you know so you're you hamstrung today by realism and by the games they're successful in the marketplace so you know perhaps that's why they were thinking I don't know

it sounded in your talk as if the first time you guys figured out that it was in any way successful was when they called you jaws to give this talk so so what was like when did you guys start to feel like hey this game kind of matters someway yeah when did we when did the team realized hey this game kind of matters in a way you know I remember going to e3 very near the end I'm feeling extremely pained other things some people said when they came up there were there were eight consoles with gold nine people who come up and playing some people said oh look

graphics are amazing and then it's like yes score and next person come like water peace so yeah not then that was that was 95% of the way through developing the game we had like five six seven levels in working we were basically nearly done we shouldn't have gone to e3 we should have been back in twycross zoo today didn't sell a massive spike so it was really debatable if us at success once it was launched and then it came out in Japan and much of Europe David Oak has a graph of the rentals for goldeneye in the US is very interesting

it's completely flat graph it just goes on for about two years it just goes on and on and on the game just sold you know not millions it sold like a hundred thousand two hundred thousand a month and then again and then again and again and that was I guess when we realized it was it was something it was going to sell more than a million copies it's going to sell more than two million you know gradually we realized it was going to have commercial success but but really you know I still don't know and I warned her that people still going to mention it in another 15 years I think he's still going to mention it in another 50 years so you know games can come and go they can be talked about for a while so you know really I still don't know whether it will be eternal yeah

that's true yeah well you know the golden team was all spread around now a couple of guys in Canada in the US and spread around the UK but still yeah that's a good idea hey Golan I seem to be this kind of perfect storm of like eight guys has just never made a game before your management seem to be just yeah go ahead do what you like there's kind of really free happy time of just game development that has become the quintessential bond game every game since has tried to recapture that spirit and that excitement do you think that's ever

doable again now that the game industry has gotten so serious do you think that's it was a one-time thing of everything coming together and making this great game so Goldeneye was a perfect storm of everything coming together you say and it's the quintessential bond game that people try and live up to is there any possibility that that could react our first of all I have no subject I have no objectivity you know I I'm completely in love with my games every one of them and I don't feel you know I should be raised up on a podium in a position of authority to decide that I know that I personally love Goldeneye in the way it turned out but you know whether whether it will

always be the best bond game I really cannot say you mentioned one thing I'd like to pick up which was I gave the impression you know it was all it was all plain sailing and management was like yeah do whatever you I do have some stories of things things they wanted to happen the you know mainly didn't but occasionally did happen wish I'd be happy to tell if anybody wants to hear them but 99% of the time yes it was we got to do what we wanted that seems to be it for questions thank you ever so much everyone [Applause] [Music]