Original subtitles

Final Fantasy VII.

GoldenEye 007.

- We were all really

I think we were all kind of at that stage

in our lives where we were really hungry to do something.

- We were young and naive.

- Young and inexperienced,

and had no idea what they were doing.

- I wanted to show people that I could do this.

- It was our first game,

I don't think we knew quite what we had.

It's a great lineup.

The interactive title of the year.

- It was a movie license

done by a small team of inexperienced

developers and somehow ended up being

the greatest first-person shooter of its era.

This is one of the best video games

of all time.

- You couldn't ask for a better cocktail recipe.

- Here's your spy playground.

- The guns, the gadgets, the cars,

the girls, the memorable villains, amazing exotic settings.

- One of the most important video games yet made,

had a transformative effect on the industry.

You can look at the video game landscape today

and trace back its origins in GoldenEye.

- GoldenEye is one of those wonderful games

that almost splits the game industry into two times.

There's before GoldenEye and there's after GoldenEye.

- Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield,

all of that goes back to GoldenEye.

First-person shooters were really this PC elite genre.

3D gaming was really coming to

the fore for the first time.

The social element, the friendship element,

the skill and personal achievement, right?

It's one package that sums up all the reasons

I play and want to make games.

Ah, the 1990s, a time of innocence,

optimism, and social cohesion, and Spice Girls.

There were no mobile phones, no social media,

the internet was but a whisper on the wind

and TV consisted entirely of the same

old channels we'd had for decades.

The video games industry was still young,

widely considered to be the realm of children

and toy makers, but it was changing fast

as game makers were still discovering what games could be.

Many video games have graced our screens over the years,

few are played decades later,

even fewer change the way we play.

This is the story of a game that did just that.

Rare was founded in the 1980s

by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper.

The Stamper brothers began their journey

developing a series of acclaimed titles

for the ZX Spectrum and built themselves

quite a reputation for innovative high quality games.

In 1985, their work caught the eye

of Japanese gaming giant Nintendo.

In fact, Nintendo loved what they saw so much,

they invested in the fledgling outfit,

taking a 49% shareholding in the company.

This relationship would go down as one of the most

fruitful collaborations in video game history.

Together, they would go on to create

some of the most beloved video games of the nineties.

What's amazing is that Rare

is this just, really...

at the time, it was this really reclusive developer.

They didn't tell you anything.

They were very kind of secret,

and so secret that not many people knew where they

were based, and they were based on

what used to be a farm in the Midlands.

Middle of England, a barn,

groups of people that had really not done

a lot of video game stuff before, were killing it.

Twycross is absolutely,

there's nothing in it.

Twycross is a village that contains, it's got one pub.

It's got a private school.

A bit further up the road there's Twycross zoo

which is quite famous, but that is it.

You have this extremely talented

cutting edge

game development studio out in the middle of nowhere, right?

In countryside in England.

I mean over that period of what, six years,

they'd done some of the best 2D platformers,

some of the best 3D platformers,

one of the best fighting games,

one of the best racing games,

and certainly one of the best first-person shooters.

People underestimate the influence

of Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper.

They were just absolutely always in complete sync.

There was never a point in time where

those two guys didn't agree on something.

There was always absolute solidarity

and they knew exactly what they wanted.

There was never a time you could say, we're not sure.

Tim would always know how it needs to be

for that to be fantastic.

The whole point of Rare was to do things differently,

to not just make the same games

that have come before, but it works for them.

They're kind of isolated a little bit

in that they're on this kind of farm style campus.

They've got different barns,

so different buildings where the different teams

make different games and they are

just in this little Rare world.

You know, when you buy a Nintendo game,

it would have the Nintendo seal of quality?

To me, the Rare logo, back then,

was the Nintendo seal of quality.

You knew you were getting an amazing game.

You used to always want to make the fact

that the Rare logo should sell the game

without even knowing about the review.

You see that blue R on that game box, you buy it.

- They just didn't make bad games.

- Rare was a very sort of clandestine place in some respects

nobody ever did interviews,

no one knew what we were up to until the game came out.

No one had any idea because Tim and Chris

weren't interested in fame,

we just work on the games, we focus on the games,

make them the best they can be,

we put them out and they do the talking.

Rare was a very important

and iconic developer

back during the nineties, you know.

It really pushed the boundaries,

not just with the N64.

So, they developed Donkey Kong Country.

That was a game which used pre-rendered 3D graphics.

And for it to be on that console

at that time, it looked amazing.

They were able to render these gorgeous

3D models and then make them 2D sprites,

but they maintained almost the same level of graphical

fidelity as their original source models had.

It just made the Super Nintendo look

like it could be the next generation console.

It wasn't old. It was new again.

It was evident back in Donkey Kong Country

where they were using 3D development stuff

in a 2D environment to give the illusion of a 3D world.

Nobody was doing that at all.

So in the late nineties

we saw a lot of innovation around how games are played,

how games control, how camera systems work,

how progression in levels work, all of that stuff.

It was kind of this Wild West of developers

trying a whole bunch of different things.

And then, you know, over time,

certain things stuck around, certain things went away.

The PC market was absolutely booming

thanks to the advent of 3D graphics cards.

Welcome to the world of Doom.

A hellish nightmare for the more real...

- Because the PC was the home of the first-person shooter.

We didn't call them first-person shooters.

We called them Doom clones

because everyone made games that were kind of like Doom.

First-person shooters,

let's remember at the time, weren't a thing,

they weren't a genre.

They were just shooters in a 3D environment.

The landscape for first-person shooters

was pretty young back then.

It was more about monster closets, fast paced shooting,

you know, skill-based gameplay,

but not really campaign-based

storytelling and puzzle solving.

For me, FPS was just id games.

It was Wolfenstein and Doom because that's all I knew.

And then moving into Quake and Unreal

around the same era as one another.

You had kind of, you know

violent games beginning to kind of become popular.

And so you needed the consoles to match that.

- I'd seen really rad, awesome 3D stuff in the arcades

playing all sorts of video games like Virtua Cop and things.

But the concept of having three-dimensional

first-person shooter game at home was revolutionary.

- This transition from Mega Drive and Super Nintendo

to the PlayStation or even the Sega Saturn

adapting to these new forms is introducing

all these new challenges and problems.

- You'd seen some experimentations with 3D

on the Super Nintendo, things like Star Fox and F-Zero

and Pilotwings, and it was sort of fake 3D.

It wasn't really good 3D.

- Most interesting is how the different developers

kind of used this newfound power

of using the third dimension,

like how they would use it to create new experiences.

- It's also around this sort of time

that you had Tomb Raider.

Tomb Raider was made in Britain. You had Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto was made in Scotland.

There were a lot of very kind of ambitious

creative UK developers trying to push the bounds

of this new 3D world and what we could do with it,

and they were having worldwide hits.

I'd been to lots of interviews in London.

It was like, great, London.

Then I ended up in a farmhouse in Warwickshire

it was quite bizarre.

The actual layout was you have

the big farmhouse itself

which was sorting out all the minutia of the day.

You know, making sure the company works

and all that sort of stuff.

And then there were literally barns

where they used to keep the horses.

And these had been turned into offices

and each team was in one of the barns

and where the horse sort of stalls where

they'd been turned into our individual offices.

They were each big enough for

two or three people.

When I started, I had one to myself,

which was right next to the crèche.

So I got to hear kids playing all day.

Of course there was no internet,

so it was like get on with this,

you're in your computer now, get on with it.

But it was really nice, that barn sort of feel to it.

That was very much how Rare worked.

It was kind of everyone was in their little silo

and there was a Donkey Kong barn,

and there was a barn that ended up where Banjo was.

There was the Killer block, people making Killer Instinct.

I was 22 when I joined Rare.

I think the others were mostly about the same

or a little bit older.

Well, I was straight out of uni,

so I'd never worked on an actual

game that had been released.

24 and no experience at all in making games.

Rare was my first job out of the university, so.

I was a scientist.

So I was at Oxford University and I'd done my degree and PhD

and I worked in molecular structure determination.

So I was about 23, I guess.

I had not got a degree at that point.

I'd dropped out of architecture.

For someone like me,

I really genuinely thought I'd just end up like a tramp.

I did the university thing, messed around in bands

for years and years to get to 33,

so 11 years as a long time just living at home with my mother.

I don't know, I would've just been a pub rocker

making 30 quid a night probably to this day.

So when I joined Rare, I would have been,

I'd just turned 23 and all my experience up to that point

was playing games and wanting to do music for games.

- As well as the artists and programmers,

they wanted a system administrator

to go and run their Silicon Graphics network.

And at the time I was running a Silicon Graphics network

as part of my job in the lab. And I'd had a bad day...

I kinda thought, well, yeah, screw it. I'll apply for this.

- This was my first job. It was a good job.

I was earning more money than I ever had done before.

And I was getting to work on James Bond.

- The name's Bond, James Bond.

- A new project had come in from Nintendo.

They've got the rights to GoldenEye.

And they'd come to Rare and said,

would you lead a new team to make this GoldenEye game?

The offer for a movie game,

a movie tie-in game, came up to Rare.

It was kind of the last thing anyone wanted to do.

- They didn't really like making adult games.

They wanted to make broad appeal family games.

So GoldenEye was a little bit out of the ordinary for them.

- Martin Hollis was the guy who stepped up

and said, okay, I'll do this. This could be kind of fun.

And everyone else was like, great, cool.

We want to keep making our own games.

Martin Hollis, a young, ambitious

university graduate from the south of England

had only been with Rare a short time

before the opportunity to make GoldenEye came up.

His total experience working in games

was a brief stint working on a coin-op

conversion of Killer Instinct, and that was it.

He was, however, a massive Bond fan,

as evidenced by this homage to

the infamous Bond gun barrel sequence

he made with his brothers as a young lad,

shown here at a GDC 2012 GoldenEye talk.

But making a game about Bond

would be a much larger challenge.

Hollis would have to build a team and a game from scratch.

Martin's first recruit to the team

was programming prodigy, Mark Edmonds.

A man of few words, Mark was in charge

of the core engine and AI systems.

Joining him was architecture graduate

turned lead artist, Karl Hilton,

and populating Karl's environments with character models

and animations was Brett Jones.

Duncan Botwood came aboard next as a designer

to work on level progression and mission structures,

programmer Steve Ellis was brought in

to code the weapons and explosion effects,

and David Doak joined to help craft the missions,

storylines, and objectives.

But what of GoldenEye's signature soundscape?

Well, that came courtesy of Graeme Norgate

and Grant Kirkhope, with the dynamic duo

providing the music and sound effects.

And last but not least, Adrian Smith

was the final piece of the puzzle,

joining the team to help with effects and UI.

- The level of ambivalence in terms of

the studio that's managing that project,

the publisher that's funding the project,

the license holder who also has a lot of say

in what that game should be...

James Bond is one of the biggest IPs in pop culture

and everyone's like, ah, they'll make it.

- Yeah, Martin Hollis came in one day, didn't know him.

Then Martin said, "I've been offered you for my new team."

I'm like, oh great, what is it?

He said, "Well, do you like James Bond movies?"

And at the time I was thinking, you know,

I love James Bond movies.

I'm thinking, but video game James Bond movies?

In the late nineties, every major film

that came along had to have a licensed video game attached.

And this was not because Hollywood, you know,

particularly valued or respected the video game industry.

It was like, this is a really useful marketing tool.

- Nobody believed that a GoldenEye game would work.

Licensed tie-in games at the time were like a toy.

You know, you had the baseball cap,

you had the lunchbox, and you had the video game.

Movie license games often failed

because the game play wasn't good. Right?

They were cranked out to just kind of hit

a deadline and kind of resemble

the franchises that were so popular.

- We all got Bond.

There wasn't some style sheet that we needed to read.

- We were James Bond fans.

We all wanted to be James Bond. That was the whole point.

- And I was able to rattle off a load

of kind of Bond ideas because I'd read all the books

and obviously seen all the films and so on.

So I wouldn't stop talking for about half an hour

about all the things we could do with it.

- I was a big Bond fan. So I watched all the Bonds.

- When the movies came out,

they were the biggest movie of the year, always.

The best effects, the best music,

everything was spectacular in Bond films.

So you always knew

you're in for a great ride on a Bond movie.

In the first few days,

I do remember sitting down and talking about

what kind of a game it should be.

I used to love playing Spy Hunter in the arcades.

Maybe it's a sort of Spy Hunter, sort of,

top-down driving game.

They wanted to do something for the Super Nintendo,

the SNES, I assume it would have been vastly

different given the different powers of the two machines,

probably a 2D platformer.

- Everyone was working on Super Nintendo at the time.

And Martin had said to them, I will do it,

but he wanted to work on the new console

that was coming along.

- Martin had the vision, you know,

he was the only guy that had actually done a game before.

So he was the one powering through this and saying,

you know, I think we'd like to do this.

I think we'd like to do that.

- Especially in those early phases,

it's Mark Edmonds and Martin Hollis.

But Mark was the engineer.

Mark essentially built the core engine

and an awful lot of the subsequent tools

that were available to the rest of the team

to start building all the level designs

and create all these really fun, unique experiences.

- Of course you have to remember,

first-person shooters got off to a much slower start on consoles.

Yes, there were ports of games like Wolfenstein 3D

and Doom on earlier systems like the Super Nintendo,

and the 32X, but technically they were really ugly

and kind of just stumbled compared to the PC counterparts.

- At the time, people are like,

a shooter won't work on consoles because you need a PC.

You need mouse control because it's more accurate

or you need a keyboard because you've

got so many different buttons, so many different options.

- They were much better suited, that sort of game,

to the PC because you can use the mouse to aim.

You can use the keyboard to move your character.

You can map different keys to different actions.

On a video game console controller,

you're much more limited in what you can do.

- At some point, details about the Ultra 64.

They were boasting about all this new power

that this console would have.

And at some point Martin got a brain storm

and decided that actually

this sort of game would work in 3D.

- We all knew it was coming. No one had seen it.

No one knew much about it but we knew

it was going to be a 3D console.

- With the early through mid-nineties,

you're going through this massive technological upheaval,

like consoles are adapting and being built

and being released like really frequently

and really quickly, the hardware is changing,

and in turn the software that we have to build

for it is changing as well.

At this transition from 2D into 3D gaming,

we don't really know what's the standard

by which we're going to build 3D games.

- Because the 3D thing was a new thing,

there wasn't a body of people with those experiences

or those skills, so you're almost

kind of taking a punt on people.

So like Karl, for instance, Karl Hilton

was an architecture graduate, you know,

and, yeah, he'd done a bit of messing around

doing 3D modeling, but not much.

- The developers are...

relatively new to this experience.

Many of them had never shipped a game before

and given a tremendous amount of freedom

to experiment and play around with ideas

and throwing things in ad hoc to see whether it sticks.

- And then we also were talking about different

shooters, particularly the Virtua Cop games.

- Originally it was supposed to be an on-rails game.

The feel of that is quite different.

- So you would go through each level at the same pace,

kind of almost Star Fox style or Time Crisis,

that sort of thing, and it would be the same each time.

And you just have to kind of improve your score each time.

- You didn't have control over movement,

but you could aim just in some of

the classic kind of arcade on-rails shooters.

- And they put everything in to make it play like Virtua Cop,

and then everyone was playing it and going

it's not any fun.

It looks like Virtua Cop, it moves like Virtua Cop,

it's got the Bond, but it's not fun.

- GoldenEye was one of those games that

kept on getting delayed and obviously

missed the release of the movie,

and even the home video release.

- It has the markings of like a small indie outfit now

who's got far more resource and budget

than anyone would potentially imagine

with no constraint on,

right, you've got to ship this in six months.

It's, we'll keep paying the bills,

but could you try and ship something?

- Nintendo is not like many other video game companies

in that, you know, it was able to say

it cares most, first and foremost about the quality

of the games that appear on its hardware.

So it's less about we need to hit this release date

so that we maximize our profits

because we're tying in with the film's release.

It's more like, no, we're gonna wait on this

until it's right, until it's ready, until it's good.

- Now there was concerns that it wasn't a very Nintendo-ish

product, it was quite, we got told

repeatedly it was too dark and it was violent.

To which our response was, well,

it's dark because the film's dark and it's violent

because it's James Bond and he kills people.

- There's a very well-known story now

that Martin Hollis tells about

late into the game's development receiving a fax

from Shigeru Miyamoto, who is still the most

famous video game designer in the world.

And certainly was at that time.

Sort of giving us feedback on GoldenEye,

and he says he doesn't like the violence.

He says it sort of feels tragic,

and is there no way that at the end of the game,

you as Agent 007 can visit the hospital ward

where all of the people that you've taken down

during the course of the game are sort of holed up

and can you not work your way down

the beds shaking everyone's hands?

It's obviously a very funny story, but it also illustrates,

I think, something about Nintendo

and Miyamoto's approach to video game design,

and probably their nervousness about a game

like GoldenEye appearing on their flagship hardware.

At one point they were even saying, well,

we're not sure about this. Maybe we just cancel it.

And because they'd rather lose that money

and preserve their reputation as a fantastic

video game publisher than they would to

recoup some of that money

and put something else out that's substandard.

So let's do a quick summary. Shall we?

We have an inexperienced ragtag group

of university graduates working in a barn

somewhere in the English countryside

on a game based off a movie,

a game about a spy with a license to kill,

to be played on a console that didn't exist yet

for the company that brought you

Princess Peach and Zelda. Get all that?

- It's the N64! Oh my God!

- This holiday season, it's the new Nintendo 64.

So what's the big deal,

and why is Toys "R" Us already sold out?

When we all got our production N64s

and everyone had Mario, and Pilotwings and stuff,

but particularly Mario,

literally people were sitting in offices

watching other people play Mario,

and everyone was going...

You know, jaw drop.

From the moment you pick up that game,

it just says, go, explore.

- It was symbolic of the time that, you know,

you had this new level of freedom, you know,

afforded by games like GoldenEye 007,

and Super Mario 64, and Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

You know, there was, I think, an emphasis

from a gameplay perspective to get

the players to go off and explore.

I remember the first time seeing Super Mario 64,

and it was really the first time I'd seen a 3D game

and it was like the world had changed.

And we're right on this tipping era

that we'll never see again in the same way

of moving from two dimensions to three dimensions,

which was such a tremendous shift

in the way that not only games would be made,

but also thought about, but also played.

- That just blew people's minds.

You can wander around doing stuff that you'd never been able

to do before, exploring the game in a way

that you'd never been able to.

- I had that curiosity, I was just like,

oh, what's that over there?

N64 games and GoldenEye specifically,

which led me to be the games tester that I am now.

You know, that curiosity, I was just like,

let's zoom into that with a sniper rifle.

There's a thing over there. How do we get over there?

Don't know, we'll find out.

And then you go to Facility and you poke around

all the corners and you see some flasks

and a vent and you're like, who put flasks up there?

- It just had this go anywhere, do anything,

kind of flavor to it even though

it's not really an open world game.

A lot of the levels kind of feel like you

can kind of go everywhere, go anywhere,

and just play around with it.

And so it was just such an open feeling.

- Before GoldenEye, most first-person shooters

operated with the Doom clone mentality.

Shoot everything that moves, collect the keys,

go through the doors, find the exit, rinse and repeat.

GoldenEye, depending on the difficulty you selected,

would give you different objectives.

It's not just A to B.

Some of them are A to B, but it's A to B

via objectives C, D, and E.

Here's a level, this is what you need

to do in the level before you leave.

- Doom had it to a point and Quake had it to a point

where there's keycards, right?

Blue, the gold, the red, but it was kind of rudimentary,

'cause it was early nineties gaming, you know?

GoldenEye come out, and it was just like,

no, we have to talk to this character over here.

That's never happened to me before in a video game,

in terms of FPS, I have to then look at my watch

to get something, throw it at a thing,

it was doing so many things new and fresh at the time,

but looking back like it completely rewrote

the rules for video games, FPS and otherwise.

- It wasn't until, I would say, 1997,

kind of the year that first-person shooters

exploded on the Nintendo 64,

when you had this perfect union of a controller

that was up to the job of playing FPS

and hardware that was up to the job of running

and displaying FPS that the genre

really took off on consoles.

- Within the year of GoldenEye coming out in 1997,

there was Doom 64, which isn't a port of Doom,

it's a completely separate Doom game

that was made with id Software's blessing,

Hexen 64, which is a direct port of the game,

but also, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

- It was very impressive from a lot of standpoints,

very complex worlds were built.

The characters were not sprites anymore.

They were fully 3D again

and had pretty intricate animations.

- When you see something like that and you look at your own work,

and all you can see are the things that are wrong with it.

You know, you're thinking, oh God,

we're miles behind on this.

I remember being really worried because it had very nice

looking art and it ran really smoothly.

It had really good frame rate because they had the fog

a lot of the time and these dinosaurs

would run out of the fog at you at a really nice frame rate.

You'd be like, oh, that's nice.

We did look at that and think, oh,

do we need to go back and try and get the game

to run faster, is there anything else I can do?

Should we be turning off the Z buffer and things like that?

Yeah, it was a real benchmark for us.

So I started building the dam

without any real technical knowledge

and I was playing around with the size of it and we realized

we could take the movies as a source for sure.

And we also look at the set models and the set diagrams

that they'd drawn out, that they built.

- And he just built the dam

and then we put it in and it's like, woah!

- We ended up with this real sprawling mass of a level

that was running at an abysmally low frame rate.

- So then that's why you have the tunnels leading up to it,

was to try and cut as much of the views off as possible.

You know, and then I went through and basically hacked

as many polys out as I could.

There'd be a big thing

that Martin put up which would show you

the frame rate you currently had.

So I could spin around and look at what he was doing.

And then suddenly the framerate would drop horrendously.

It's like, right, what's over there?

Okay. Go in, hack around.

That was a kind of awakening for me.

Like, oh yeah, it's got to run. Oh, okay.

- The engine was great because I could sit there

on my machine and play with stuff

and then immediately make the level,

put it in the game, and then try it out again.

So I could just go through this process

of just hacking away at this.

So you start off with levels that look fantastic.

And by the time I'd finished with them,

they were sort of a bare bones.

- And we got to go to Leavesden Studios,

where they were filming GoldenEye.

And we had a day's visit there.

And because I had this very rare thing

called the digital camera at the time,

which was this massive, massive, heavy camera.

My job was to go round and film and, you know,

try and get reference for everything.

And we saw St. Petersburg where they had the tank chase

and that was all still up.

And then inside one of the actual studios was the huge,

you know, the villain's lair set at the end.

And we saw that while it was in its pristine condition.

Then we went back the second time

we saw it in its blown up condition.

- Martin was very pragmatic about stuff.

It's like, you go off and make what you want to make.

And then we'll look at it and work out

how we're going to get it to work.

It was all very, very co-operative.

It was never like, this is what you do.

This is how you do it. Don't break these rules.

It was much more, what kind of things do you need?

A good example is the frigate.

That's in it because in the film

there's a helicopter is on a frigate in Monaco.

So Karl had built the frigate and we had

a helicopter model and that was it.

So it was like, well, okay,

so what are you going to do in that level?

Maybe you're trying to rescue hostages.

Well, that sounds like it might work.

Okay. Well, let's roll with that.

- Someone would come back in and go actually, Mark,

what would also be great, can we do this?

Can we have them like dodge roll

or hide behind cover, like, okay.

That's not in there now, and then a couple of days later,

boom, it appears in the source.

I was then doing a lot of the gun modeling.

So I was working in conjunction with Mark Edmonds,

not only to get the front end in,

'cause I had to model all the hands.

It was myself and Mark that came up with the HUD,

and I should have trademarked that

because the HUD was pretty much then the go-to

front end for any of the consoles.

- It was always, what can we do? What can we create?

What sort of things can we do? How do we do it?

- Creates this kind of crazy cycle of iteration,

everything that Mark Edmonds was doing

and building, that code base,

but also allowing the designers that kind of level

of flexibility to just create whatever they wanted.

He was working really hard in this whole backend

that was reduced into byte code

that was really performant and ran super quick

on what was ultimately very limited hardware on the N64.

Under the watchful eye of the Stampers,

the team would work long days and weekends

polishing and refining the gameplay levels and difficulty.

They would even bring in elements of the extended James Bond

universe to create a game overflowing with content

and creativity, but would it pay off?

These days, you can load up a synth patch

put your finger on a keyboard and it's this

huge, great, swathe of sound that's just incredible.

It's just amazing, but we couldn't do that then.

Most of the sounds in GoldenEye are probably

16 or 11 kilohertz, right down at the bottom end.

Like bass drums, you put them in at eight, you know.

So, you know, it's a quarter

of the quality that you would get on a CD.

- The gas plant music is a particular one.

You know, that opening kind of, "doo, doo".

When I hear that, I still get a bit goosepimply about it.

The music and the soundscape and the pacing itself

it's like, now you're Bond.

- It's what I love, I think, is it sounds like a score.

Every song feels like it's come

from the same soundtrack. It feels cohesive.

And that's very difficult to do.

Their ability to carve a theme

and create an emotion

and a feeling that instantly linked you

to whatever your goal was, whatever your mission was,

but also whatever the environment was,

whether it's a snowy sort of area

or a sneaky area through a facility.

- GoldenEye, I think, is an excellent example

of having a believable world that you can explore

and you add kind of, you know,

atmospheric music and then you've got action, et cetera.

You begin to build the sense of a narrative-led

first-person shooting experience,

which obviously we have, you know, everywhere now.

- Their ability to use nothing more

than a limited sound palette and a series of notes

is what makes that a great score.

A lot of thought had gone into creating,

again, a believable aural landscape.

- With Graeme Norgate doing the sound design,

the gun sounds in that game are really,

really good for their time.

That soundscape was crafted with

just absolute love and respect.

It's a luxury of being in-house.

We could play the game, so you'd load up Servenya,

walk through it, play it, and you'd get the idea for it.

And you could write something and have that playing

whilst you're playing the level again,

and, you know, iterate.

- That's another person who is a talented person

at the height of their skills,

trying to do something really well.

And then it all came together.

When I joined the project

they weren't any effects really,

so I think the first thing that I worked on was explosions.

- Everything explodes. It's ridiculous.

- Yeah, everything did explode if you shot it

long enough, I think, pretty much.

- But it's part of the world.

It's like you're in this world and there's this

kind of brittle consequence for things

and this escalating calamity if you do something wrong

and this explodes, this explodes,

then this scientist gets blown across the room.

Yeah. I spent ages working on that.

I think it was more than a month on the explosions.

Effects are always one of the most expensive things.

They can have quite a large impact on the frame rate

of the game, the responsiveness.

- That sense of immersion and impact on the game world

is another thing that's going to keep

bringing players back to keep playing

because it's a space that they can control

in more of a way than they could with things like Doom.

- It's not in Doom, there's not that collateral damage.

And the idea that the environment is mutable in some way.

It was something that was really important to us.

The job I was not expecting

when I answered an advertisement for a game designer

and document writer was to be stuffed into a sweaty

neoprene suit and asked to fall over. But...

One day, I was asked to put on a sweaty neoprene suit

that'd been used for Killer Instinct and to fall over a lot.

I would have Mr. Botwood there,

all covered in the markers,

and then depending on how he was

going to get killed at that point,

he would either have a rope around him

and I'd yank him or he would get pushed

or he would get kicked in the knee.

You know when you see those guys, they get shot in the shoulder

and you see them do that?

That's me literally going like that and pushing him

on the shoulder until he moves

because you can't anticipate because

otherwise there's that.

He was battered, he was really battered.

I remember one time Tim Stamper got the team

into a conference room and explained to them

that it's not a university project and it does

need to be finished at some point.

Regardless of the game being late

and missing deadline after deadline, you know,

it wasn't because we were putting our feet up.

- I believe they were all in their late twenties

or early thirties. Most of them were single.

They could work 100 hour weeks.

You know, whether we think that's good

or not with hindsight, that was something

that they wanted to do and did willingly.

And we were the beneficiaries of that toil.

- It was like a company culture of,

you don't just go home at five o'clock, that's for sure.

- We used to work late at Rare.

We used to like being there.

- Right from the start, we'd be there till midnight

and working weekends and stuff.

- You didn't have to stay,

but it was kind of assumed that you would.

So most of the time we did.

We thought the game was going to be

really bad.

So that was always the thing.

It's like, A, there's not enough variety.

It's going to be boring. It's just running and shooting.

And also we're not going to get all the levels finished.

- It was hugely late, and it was massively full of bugs.

There was just so many things wrong with it

that it sort of became that game

that we all thought would never actually come out in the end.

- Hi, I'm Ken Lobb.

I'm here to tell you about the Nintendo 64 hardware.

Ken Lobb was a big fan of the game.

I mean, we had a lot of support, particularly from America.

- And here we have the controller ports.

I'd like you to notice that we have one, two, three, four.

Nintendo 64 shipped with

four controller ports, right?

And Mario Kart 64 obviously demonstrated to the world

how to properly use those four ports.

- You know, from the very offset,

the machine comes with four players.

Now you still have to buy two other controllers,

but not if your mates bring them around with them, right?

So as a developer, you're then beginning to think,

let's try and use it, perhaps there is something in here.

- That was a big departure from having to configure

your LAN and having multiple copies of every game

and playing across all these different monitors.

I'm gonna say roundabout April or May, '97,

we started work on it. Seems insanely close.

In the meantime, Nintendo of America

are going, you are finishing the game, right?

You're not trying to put multiplayer in or anything are you?

No, no, no we're not. No.

It's fine. Yeah, we're finishing the game.

There was no way Martin going to be able

to go to management and say, you know what?

We'd really like to put multiplayer in.

'Cause just like no, you're failing to do the thing

you're supposed to be doing,

don't be asking for more time.

I just remember the day we showed it to Ken

because Ken would come over every kind of,

couple of months, something, to Rare.

I remember him coming over and we'd set up.

It was in the office where Steve and Duncan were

we had TV and we had with the four controllers sitting.

So that was the thing. So he came in,

I just remember, walked in with Ken,

Ken, we've got something to show you.

And he's like, wow!

Ken was always... He used to say,

Oh my God, you guys! It's like, yeah, it works.

- And he was so excited by it

that he wanted to be the one who revealed it

to the testers at Nintendo.

- So Treehouse is NoA's, Nintendo of America's,

testing and kind of like game evaluation department,

which Ken Lobb was heavily involved in,

and we started to get feedback from them,

which was, you know, people are coming in

and playing at the weekend.

It's like, you know, everyone wants

to be testing your game, all that kind of stuff.

Going to E3 was kind of seen as a break for us

because we were close to gold

and there was a big testing push while we were there.

- When we were at E3, we had the smallest stand

because nobody really knew what we were doing,

but it was played all the time.

We had a playable version on the floor

and the booths were absolutely rammed.

I remember watching everyone playing it

and just really enjoying it.

So you thought, okay, well this is good.

- But it was being played all the time.

The entire time, you know, you were there,

you could just see people playing GoldenEye.

It was busy, really busy the whole time.

Bolstered by the positive feedback

from E3 and testing, the team

head into the final stretch with their spirits high.

All their hard work and dedication

appeared to be paying off,

but just as the game was about to be shipped,

an order came through from mission headquarters.

- Yes. I made Timothy Dalton, Roger Moore, and Sean Connery.

And I made them all particularly

because I gave them all different types of jackets.

So one of them had a white one on,

one had a little red carnation.

One of them had the double breasted suit.

So yeah, I have pictures of them all

because I definitely made them.

- Got a fax I think it was in those days,

saying you can't have the other Bonds in it.

We don't have the rights.

- There is one cartridge with all four Bonds in.

And I think I know who has it at the moment,

but we had to take them out because Sean Connery

wouldn't let us use his likeness.

In a somewhat ceremonial goodbye,

the team played one final death match.

Doak, Hollis, Edmonds, and Hilton

took part in a three-hour marathon session

to decide who was the ultimate James Bond.

- So we thought, well, we need to have a final game.

So we all sat around one evening and played it,

and yeah, I can't remember who won.

It wouldn't have been me,

but I usually played Roger Moore 'cause he was my favorite.

When we were making it,

we were just trying to get it finished.

That was an overarching memory

of particularly the last year was just,

can we just please get it finished?

Because it's just taking forever.

- You get to the end of the game and you are blind

to what's good about it and all you can see

is all the things that were on your wishlist

that you haven't had the time to do.

So you kind of only see its flaws.

- You see all the things that are wrong with it.

We knew the frame rate was awful in places,

there were loads of art that I did

that we didn't manage to get in.

There were game ideas that we didn't get in.

It was late and we knew the film had long since gone.

So, you know, whether anyone was going

to be remotely interested in it when it came out,

I had no idea at all.

After working some utterly back-breaking hours,

the game was finally deemed finished

and sent to the distributors.

GoldenEye 007 released on the 25th of August, 1997.

GoldenEye was not a smash hit on day one

like in the way that the really big games are today.

GoldenEye 007 not only defined a generation,

but defied all expectation.

It was more word of mouth

and sort of a snowball effect.

When it did finally release and everyone

started playing it and people start playing the multiplayer,

there was a real buzz around it.

People were talking about, you know,

people talking about it at the playground, at work.

- You like shoot people in the head

when they're having a shit in the toilet in the air vent,

and I'm just like, this sounds interesting.

- Shooting that dude who was on the toilet

and just being like, oh, you poor bastard.

I felt so bad for him.

- Straight away you were there. You were James Bond.

You were playing James Bond, and that was it.

- Definitely the first time just sticking the cartridge in,

turning it on, and it was that audio cue. Shoo!

And then you knew your life was different.

- When I got that cartridge finally at home,

literally I played throughout the night.

- My friend and I rented it like that first weekend

it was out and it was just all we did.

- I just spent the whole weekend playing GoldenEye.

- There was only one copy of GoldenEye

left in the Toys "R" Us shelves in Chatswood,

and I remember I bought the game first

because I didn't want anyone else to have that game.

- There'd be four of us playing.

There would be four behind the couch waiting to play.

There would be three more making sandwiches in the kitchen.

There'd be another two turning up after school.

That's what we did, we played GoldenEye

for two years straight.

- Here is your spy playground.

- You felt like you were somewhere

and you were actually going towards something,

and, you know, working towards

a proper goal in a real place.

- I remember the sense of wonder.

Just walking through the dam for the first time

and sort of feeling the big open spaces

that actually felt like big open spaces.

- That's the freedom that keeps you coming back.

- So glad they had the vision to go,

what if we just took James Bond off the rails

and give the player the ability

to run around and do what they want?

- You know, running into this gate

and going like, where do I go, pulling out your gun,

shooting the lock, it just blew our minds at the time.

- If you played it like you played Doom,

you'd fail the mission.

You had to use your brain,

and I think that's what helped it spread.

- It was the game everyone wanted to play.

Growing up as a PlayStation player,

and my friends who had 64s,

we were just filled with jealousy

that we could not play a game that was that good.

- I don't think I really appreciated at the time

just how much enthusiasm that the game,

you know, the game generated.

- I think the enemies really brought that game to life.

- You'd occasionally walk around a corner

and just find one scratching their bum or something like that.

Really, really bizarre.

But that little detail made a change.

- Everyone says it, but the animations like, ah,

you shot him in the hand, he's shaking it around.

You shoot him in the knee or the bum cheek

and he clenches it? Brilliant, like number one.

Then you shoot the hats off and you think,

what else can this game do?

- You could use your silencer and take out

enemies without alerting other guards.

You could take out the security cameras.

These stealth mechanics really hadn't been seen,

especially in the first-person shooter genre.

- Guards were on routes and everything,

and you could memorize them,

and you'd know when you would see their head pop up

like over a snow dune and when you could shoot him,

like I felt like I was being sneaky

for the first time in a game.

- Some of the greatest memories I have

is getting through that level in a certain time limit

and doing certain conditions to unlock certain things.

The feeling of achieving that was great.

- If you wanted to extend the life

of the game as a player,

you earn that extension rather than

buying it and downloading it, right?

And it was always in there.

- I got every single one of them,

except Facility,

which was just so difficult.

- You have to have Dr. Doak

in the right place at the right time.

- You are having the run of your life,

but you could never bank on Dr. Doak

being in the right spot.

It was just the biggest bunch of bullshit of all time.

- The way you shoot him and then feel slightly bad about it,

but it's fun and you can get away with it, so why not?

- I think there's a certain magic that happens

that GoldenEye taught all of us,

that sitting shoulder to shoulder with somebody on a couch,

even if we're on two separate TVs,

playing something, getting the reaction,

feeling the energy, right, is a magical moment.

- All you needed was one Nintendo 64,

one copy of the game, four controllers, and a TV.

The idea that you could all play on one screen,

all four of you racing down corridors,

sniping each other, laughing your heads off.

It was as much fun for an audience

as it was for the players. It was just hysterical to watch.

- GoldenEye came out and it brought everyone

out of their rooms, out of their bedrooms,

into the lounge room together, you know,

shoulder to shoulder, having a great time.

- It was some of the best times of my life,

you know, just with my friends.

- What was great was it was so customizable.

- Custom matches and the one-shot kills,

Man with the Golden Gun, Slappers Only.

- You'd go to play GoldenEye at a friend's house

and you'd choose Oddjob and everyone would

and the guy in the corner of the room

would stop playing the piano and everything like that.

It was just not done.

- He'd be the smallest one.

And you'd fight to play Oddjob.

- Anyone who chose Oddjob was the biggest

asshole in the lounge room.

- It just made it all the more fun, all the more social.

And it kind of made me look forward

to actually hanging out with my family,

which I don't do so much now.

- Gaming really is inherently social.

The first games that were commercial were in arcades

where you'd have to go out and be among other people.

Sometimes your friends,

sometimes you'd meet complete strangers.

And it kind of recreated that arcade feeling

of standing behind the players at the controls,

putting your quarter on the dash, and saying, I got next.

- After GoldenEye, every FPS that came out,

people were asking what kind of multiplayer modes,

how are you handling split-screen, how does it run?

- GoldenEye became the game that set

the gold standard for first-person shooters on console.

It was the template that the genre

would follow on consoles going forward.

The interactive title of the year...

is GoldenEye.

Getting a BAFTA was awesome.

Yeah, especially because it was

at the interactive Oscars,

Martin had to go up and give a speech

and thank everybody for working on the team.

And he mentioned all the team members by name,

and then he paused and he went...

- And Duncan Botwood.

- Because he'd forgotten him. That was a good moment.

So the whole team was there

and it was the first time they ran those awards

and we won four of them, including the top one.

So we were pleased with that.

- We got copies of those. We've all got copies of those.

We had to pay for them but we got copies of them

and they say "copy" on the back.

But they are real BAFTAs and they weigh a ton

and I'm very proud of them, and they sit in my living room

and they get polished once a year.

Looking back at it, I think there was

a lot of talent on the team, you know.

It's certainly some of the most talented

people I've ever worked with were on that team.

I still don't really, you know,

I don't even believe it personally.

I just, I still couldn't do the connect

between what was happening in the real world, and, you know,

what we'd just spent two and a half years making.

- And it's still like, wow, we did a really good job.

We have no idea what we were doing.

- Obviously like the critical acclaims

super nice to see. It was extra special.

My first game, don't get me wrong,

it's the first box I had in my hand,

that was like, oh my God, I'm on this, you know.

But I was slightly detached

I guess towards the end of it.

- GoldenEye kept winning awards,

and at some point it just, I don't know,

it stopped being a thing that was very interesting

because it just, yeah, it just won all the awards.

One thing I do remember is on the walk back

from the AIS awards in Atlanta back to the hotel,

I remember saying to the team,

it's all downhill from here.

We're never going to do anything else this successful.

At that point, we'd just won everything.

With the game on store shelves

and the team taking a well-earned breather,

the word on the street was spreading quickly.

GoldenEye was the new game in town,

an innovative, boundary pushing

cocktail of action-adventure.

The game was a critical darling,

ushering in new levels of innovation across areas

including visuals, animation, sound,

storytelling, and artificial intelligence.

GoldenEye was innovative in so many ways,

but one of the most significant was stealth.

Rare replaced the search and destroy mentality

of the Doom genre with mission objectives.

From there on in, the bullet was no longer

the only solution to every problem.

This freedom of choice would have

a long lasting impact on the industry,

challenging our expectations of what games could be

and paving the way for a whole new genre

of stealth games to emerge.

It was official, James Bond had arrived in video games,

selling 8 million copies, earning critical acclaim,

and a host of awards.

Turns out, the world of international espionage

was a perfect formula for video game success.

The game was so successful, in fact,

it even surpassed the film.

Together, they would reignite the Bond franchise

and introduced James Bond to a whole new generation.

The big question would be,

could future games live up to the bar set by GoldenEye?

Steven Spielberg's son Max was playing

GoldenEye with his friends one day and Spielberg

walks past and looks at the telly,

and at that time I think he was just coming to the end

of his work on Saving Private Ryan

and can immediately see the creative synchronicity

or potential between a video game like GoldenEye

with a view through a first-person perspective

and a period in history, such as World War 2,

and immediately from there sort of asks

the designers at Electronic Arts to mock up an idea

of how they could perhaps remodel

the Normandy landings, I believe, or D-Day,

using first-person shooter mechanics.

- We all talk about the flying into the head,

but that's such a subtle but important design decision

that literally immerses you in it.

Okay, now you are in the role of James Bond.

Now you are this character,

and now we're going to send you through this adventure.

- No one had done something set in a

realistic world where, there were real things there,

there were like tanks, there were jet airplanes,

there were ships, there were normal guns.

I say normal guns like machine guns, silenced pistols,

sniper rifles, everything was recognizable,

including the bad guys, obviously Russians

a lot of the time.

So all of a sudden we went from having

all these fantastical elements

to you had actually a real situation

that you could identify with.

- And that's something that has definitely, I think,

impacted the single-player design team on Call of Duty.

We never take you out of the role

of that person you're playing.

It is a first-person experience.

Every action you do, whether you're climbing up an ice wall

or whether you're, you know,

in an explosion, you're shell shocked

and you're watching the events,

you're watching it from the eyes of that person.

And I think that's something that GoldenEye

set the standard for

because they knocked it out of the park and they proved

to us how effective that can be.

I think after GoldenEye we saw more games

moving away from hell demons and dragons

and fantasy

and recreating that kind of more realistic approach.

Like if you think of the Tom Clancy's franchise,

I think, you know, GoldenEye really showed everybody

that you could have, you know,

this kind of real-world setting with spies,

and, you know, make it a success.

- Metal Gear Solid was still like the next year.

And a whole host of stealth games like Thief and Tenchu.

So they were all, you know, a year away or so.

GoldenEye and its ability to experiment

becomes a progenitor for games like Thief: The Dark Project,

where it's entirely stealth oriented.

GoldenEye was the first

first-person shooter that actually made PC developers notice

the genre on console and say, oh,

we need to do something like this too

or we'll get left behind.

- Half-Life came out after GoldenEye,

and it was interesting to hear the developers

of Half-Life speak about how

they were influenced by GoldenEye.

They delayed Half-Life to make sure

that Half-Life's AI was up to snuff with GoldenEye's AI.

- One of the things that GoldenEye

in particular really sells are moving away,

not just from old light gun games, like Virtua Cop,

but even established first-person shooter franchises

like Doom, is it's the first game

that really embodies systemic design.

This idea that you can create a sandbox

which can just be reduced to outright anarchy,

where scientists are running away in panic

because you're standing there with two Klobbs

and shooting just relentlessly

at a couple of soldiers who are then trying to hit an alarm,

but you've also shot a barrel which then

causes this cascade of explosions

throughout this room and then that's catching scientists

and killing them or it's blowing up

the guy that you're trying to hit.

And these are things that you can't program that.

You can only build the tools within the world

that enable for these sorts of things to occur.

And it's crazy because now so many big games

try and embody systemic design.

That is literally the blueprint that Far Cry runs on,

that they want to have you be attacked by a tiger,

but you're also on a paraglider

and then you can drop down and throw a C4

on a Jeep, which lands on a civilian.

Like these are the things that now we're expecting.

People jump into Red Dead Redemption 2,

and they get really excited when someone

gets kicked in the face by a horse.

But GoldenEye, it was the first time

we ever really saw something like that.

And then subsequently you can start manipulating that.

And that becomes incredibly fun of, well,

what happens if I try and lure the scientists

in front of me because they're trying

to run out the back door,

but they are trying to attack me,

and then can I get them to shoot the scientists? I wonder.

And then you run off as your own little research

scientist of your own, you know,

you're putting on your own white coat,

like, let's see if we can just cause chaos

and it makes it insanely replayable.

- You can draw a direct line, I think,

from GoldenEye to Halo.

- I would argue that Halo: Combat Evolved

wouldn't be what it was if it weren't for GoldenEye.

I think it followed kind of the structure of

what GoldenEye was in terms of these larger open levels,

in terms of this kind of free flowing 3D movement

and letting you kind of explore

the level at your own kind of pace.

I think that influenced things like Halo

and then Halo inspired Call of Duty and all the others.

It all leads on, it all influences each other.

- After GoldenEye, we all thought Rare

would make another Bond game.

I mean, you roll the credits on GoldenEye,

it says James Bond will return.

And obviously that's what the movies do,

but we all hoped that Rare was saying,

hey, we had a blast making this game.

We're going to give you another FPS like GoldenEye,

maybe for the next Pierce Brosnan movie. Didn't happen.

We were going to do the next Bond license.

That was the plan. But because GoldenEye

sort of reinvigorated the franchise,

suddenly the money went up

suddenly it's like, if you want to do this,

you're gonna have to pay for it.

- The movie license wasn't that expensive

the first time round, as I understand it,

Obviously with the success of GoldenEye,

then the price goes up and we were told quite early on

that it's unlikely we would do the next one

because they weren't going to get the license.

You know, you're slightly disappointed.

You're also sort of, actually,

probably it's better to do our own thing now.

- We know how to make a video game now.

So we're just going to make a better one.

- It's actually really hard to do spiritual successors.

To actually encapsulate or capture

what were the magic qualities of that particular game.

Can you recreate something like that?

Can you, you know, catch the lightning in a bottle twice?

It was very much a product of the time.

- People have tried that, it's super, super, super, hard.

You know, GoldenEye kind of set up this

expectation, I think, with audiences that, oh,

these Bond games are going to be,

or at least should be, as good as GoldenEye,

like, you know, Rare set the standard.

And so there was just this expectation in place.

- After GoldenEye, the history of Bond games

is very very erratic.

- I didn't quite realize how big of a deal

it was that Rare lost the rights to Bond,

in that I heard that Tomorrow Never Dies was coming out.

- Tomorrow Never Dies had a tie-in on the PlayStation.

And I think that was PlayStation hoping that, you know,

well, GoldenEye did gangbusters for Nintendo,

Tomorrow Never Dies will do the same for us.

- Sweet, it's the sequel to GoldenEye.

And I remember getting that and playing it and being like,

this is not GoldenEye at all. This is nothing close.

Like I don't know, they really screwed up.

Like, not knowing that it was a completely different team,

different everything.

- You're running round levels,

like running around sets to the film,

but it wasn't quite as accurate as Rare had managed.

I remember reading reviews of Tomorrow Never Dies,

and thinking like, ah, that's too bad.

- You have The World Is Not Enough afterwards,

which they kind of like, okay,

let's not mess with the GoldenEye formula.

Clearly James Bond works in first person.

We'll do another first-person shooter.

And it was good, but it was another developer

and it didn't quite have the same Rare magic.

I think it did feel very kind of A to B,

very kind of linear.

- I remember thinking that like, okay,

this has gotta be the GoldenEye that I wanted.

And it's like, ah, that's not it either.

And then I found out, oh, okay.

The team that made that is making this game

called Perfect Dark,

and that's the closest you're gonna get to GoldenEye.

Welcome to 2023.

- So Perfect Dark came along in 2000,

and it was Rare's second effort in this realm

of first-person shooter and it was highly anticipated.

Like yeah, I mean, you did it right the first time.

Let's just do that again. Just give me more of that.

- A big thing with Perfect Dark was escaping

what we saw as the confines of the GoldenEye universe.

- We could make up the storyline,

we can make up the characters.

We could do whatever the hell we wanted with it.

We could make it darker. We could make it bigger.

We could go into space. We could have laser pistols.

You know, that was the point.

We could do anything we wanted with this one

because we weren't restricted.

- And then you're on to the next thing,

so after GoldenEye we were doing Perfect Dark

and we were going to make this game

so much better than GoldenEye.

- Perfect Dark certainly feels

like an evolution of GoldenEye. It clearly is.

It still feels very similar,

but obviously everything is opened up.

- In a lot of ways, it was the kind of

sequel that the fans wanted.

It doubled down on the multiplayer aspect,

you had bots, you had much more customization

you could do in the multiplayer, lots more weapons,

just a huge array of things.

But then it went kind of off the rails,

like Indiana Jones 4 style, with aliens and stuff like that.

I don't know, it got a little silly.

- The big fight we had, myself

and Martin and others on the team,

we really wanted to have a female character.

- Jeanne d'Arc, yes.

Joan of Arc, that's where it comes from originally.

And that was Dr. Doak's idea.

- Just because it was such a misogynist industry.

It's nice to look back on that and to think

that we kind of got to push something there

because we had some clout at the time.

- Perfect Dark sold a little over 2 million copies,

I think, as compared with GoldenEye's 8 million.

- The debate between whether GoldenEye or Perfect Dark

is the better game is a very complicated one.

And there's going to be lots of people

on each side of the fence.

You can break Perfect Dark really badly.

I mean, you can do stuff that brings the game to a crawl.

Although certainly what they were

doing with bots and stuff was incredible.

There are a lot of features,

like the counter operative stuff was amazing.

There were so many great ideas in it, but I think for me,

it just didn't come out at the right time.

- GoldenEye just never left the machine as a multiplayer.

And even though Perfect Dark has more stuff

going on in there in terms of AI, weapons,

laptop guns, you know, it has more, but again,

when it comes to a quick plug and play session

with your mates, less is more, you know?

Right here, it's this one. My insane pace.

Oh my God.

I wait, I wait, I wait,

right when he starts firing to try to backboost me.

The double. Body armor. Two quick ones.

I already know I'm getting there on the perfect line.

Oh, fuck, what a run.

Fuck.

I can't even play anymore tonight after that.

It's... I don't know.

Oh! Fuck!

Fuck. Oh my God. Oh my God.

My friends, hello and welcome

to GoldenEye SpeedLore, the series where

we look at the speed run world record progression

of a stage in GoldenEye, and the stories...

So speed running is the act of trying to beat a video game

or a part of a video game as quickly as possible.

And it might sound crazy to some,

but it's kind of this additional challenge

that anyone can do in a game.

- The cheat system in GoldenEye was one of

the things that really drove the initial desire

to beat the levels fast because you had to clear

a level on a particular difficulty under a certain time

in order to unlock the cheats.

- Speed running now, after 2010 or even

the mid-2000s, started getting popularity,

but GoldenEye was big from the start.

When I took over the website,

I was updating all of the records by hand,

literally by editing HTML files.

And so people would send me emails

with all of their new records.

And then I would go and manually insert them.

When I was 15 years old, it was a big part of who I was.

- If you achieve a good time,

you can go online and say, hey, I did this.

And the people who also share that same passion

can give you some attention and respect.

- All these teenagers came together in the late nineties,

early 2000s, and became lifelong friends.

- When you get a really good new untied world record

that no one's ever had before,

it almost feels like exploring new lands.

You would finish the level

and there would be, like your heart would skip two beats,

and then you would press A and you'd be like,

you know, did I get it? And be like just... you know.

- You're the only person in the world

to see those numbers

on the end screen of the game.

You know, you're it.

- There's this sort of psychological catnip

that led to this addictive, kind of obsessive,

cycle with the game.

- There are very few things that beat that rush still today.

I can say that.

- What would lead a person to play

the same stage a thousand times in a row?

- You see a lot of guys who maybe, you know,

they're not at the best place in their life at the time.

Maybe they've just lost a job

or gotten out of a relationship or, you know,

maybe they're a bit downtrodden.

Speed running can be a natural kind of place of comfort

to give them a sense of direction and focus to carry on.

Fresh off the success of GoldenEye

and deep into production of Perfect Dark,

the unthinkable happened.

Several key members of the team,

Hilton, Norgate, Doak, and Ellis, left the company,

setting off to form a new studio, Free Radical Design.

So we started off with myself, Dave Doak,

Karl Hilton, Graeme Norgate, and Lee Ray,

who all left Rare roughly at the same time.

And we started in April, '99.

It was a hugely difficult decision.

In some respects, I mean, on the one hand,

I think we were all ready to go and do Free Radical.

And we were all very excited by the idea of Free Radical.

And we all knew we were young and confident

enough that we thought, oh, it's going to be,

yeah, we'll do this. It'll be a great success.

We'll be fine, you know.

- It was a thing that I was thinking about for a while.

After GoldenEye...

I don't know. I mean, we were young and naive

and we kind of felt like we'd done it

all ourselves, which in retrospect,

I now realize that there will have been things

going on behind the scenes that we were unaware of

that allowed us to have the time

that we had to make that game good.

With their stock high,

they signed an exclusive deal with publisher Eidos

to develop a game for a new console,

the Sony PlayStation 2.

The new game would be Time Splitters.

But could it live up to the standard

they'd set with GoldenEye?

PlayStation 2 was around the corner.

So as soon as Eidos had signed us up, you know,

then it was straight to Sony.

Look, we're going to make another game.

It's going to be a multiplayer.

I think your console is clearly going to be a great console

to do it on, and then Sony was super supportive,

and yes, suddenly we had dev kits in our office.

We were all super excited about

Free Radical and then after we played Time Splitters,

we really liked what we saw.

- We were the only European-developed launch title,

you know, so that was a very quick sort of,

here's a fun game, not much to it,

but it's got all these bits and pieces

and have a bit of fun with it.

- When we made the Time Splitters' games with Free Radical,

it was kind of like, we want a chocolate box,

we want to do everything. So those games were that.

The original Time Splitters was a multiplayer game,

just let's throw everything and see what sticks.

- I think a lot of fans went to Time Splitters and said,

oh my God, this brings back all the memories

from GoldenEye and the way it feels,

but what Free Radical did with that game

is just speed it up.

- It was all about immediacy and accessibility.

Pick up and play.

You should just be able to start playing,

choose a bunch of settings that you fancy

at that time and have fun straightaway.

- There was no great design document for Time Splitters

at the start that said,

this is the game and this is how it's going to work

and this is what things you're going to do.

- It just had such a nice feel to it.

And you could pick it up and play it

without a whole lot of learning for it as well,

which means you can get people who aren't so

big a gamers in on it, and you could actually

have your four player split-screen

and everybody's having fun.

- It wasn't representative of what we were capable of.

It was representative of what we had enough time to do.

So Time Splitters 2 was where

we wanted to show what we could do.

- Time Splitters 2 was obviously our chance to do it properly.

And we had more time and the first one had been successful.

So Eidos were happy for us to spend

a bit more money and a bit more time

making a more detailed one with a proper story,

and then a bit more character development in it.

- And they were quite hands-off.

That's a thing that was also true of GoldenEye.

I think that's the thing that makes a big difference

to the end result of a project.

The Time Splitters series

would go on to be one of the most successful

franchises on the PlayStation 2,

selling over 3.5 million copies on the system

and earning a dedicated and passionate fan base.

Throughout the mid-2000s, Free Radical Design

would go on to create titles like Second Sight

for the PS2 and Haze for the PS3.

After we finished Time Splitters,

Lucas Arts approached us and said

they'd like us to make a Star Wars game.

- It was a hugely fun thing to be working on.

Obviously the team was stoked because

we got access to all of the great

resources and history of Star Wars.

I can remember it just being an

absolute joy to go to work.

We were making what we wanted to make.

We personally felt vested in it because we owned

the business and we were creating our thing.

Back at Rare, change was in the air.

The Nintendo deal had reached its end

and Rare needed a new partner.

Companies like Activision and Microsoft were circling.

And for the successful bidder,

the spoils would be Rare's reputation

and its passionate fan base.

For Rare, it was an opportunity to secure

the long-term viability of the company,

but it wouldn't be without risk.

The Rare faithful would have to hold their breath

as giant corporations moved in.

Owners of the company and the founders,

Chris and Tim stamper, put the company up for sale.

And they're looking to find a buyer.

Microsoft's interested, Activision's interested

and Nintendo is interested.

And I think a lot of the staff were like, well, you know,

hopefully we'll be acquired fully by Nintendo,

but Nintendo's CEO at the time gives them a valuation

that's way, way lower than what they're after.

And Activision puts in a big bid.

So it looks for a moment that they're going to go

with Activision, and then for one reason or another,

that deal falls through.

When Microsoft bought Rare in 2002,

I believe it was, I think they lost a little bit.

I think some people at Rare would kind of agree with that.

Case in point, that's when you started

to see people leave Rare and form Free Radical.

Microsoft wanted to really push Kinect

and really want to push this kind of hands-free control thing.

But you had Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventure,

all these kinds of games that people

just didn't feel were Rare.

You didn't feel that Rare quality about it

because they were mini game collections

and that's not really what Rare did. Rare built worlds.

- I left Rare because I became less enamoured

with it as time went, after Tim and Chris left,

that was it for me. I liked them being there.

When they left, I don't think I left long after that.

I didn't want to be there really anymore.

For a long time we described that as

the best publisher relationship we'd ever had,

it was working really, really well.

It was going so well that not long after that,

they asked us to also start working

on the sequel at the same time.

In order to do that, we had to grow the company.

As it got bigger and bigger,

more time was kind of spent on dealing

with the frictions that you have,

particularly with publishers.

- It was two and a half years,

but I mean the amount of money

in at that point would have been eight figures.

The funding model then was publisher advances.

And if you have a good publisher relationship,

then you're safe,

but that relationship has always got some conflict in it.

It got to the point where we were doing milestones

every month and sending them off.

And if the publisher didn't like what they saw,

we wouldn't get paid, and our burn rate was astronomical.

So, you know, it doesn't take much

for the wheels to come off.

- Unfortunately, you know, the story was

not a great one obviously, you know, the studio

running into trouble with Battlefront development.

- That becomes quite difficult

if that goes on for more than a few months,

because everyone needs to get paid.

- When it came to the end of the year,

we had to put the company into administration.

- That was gutting, you know.

- In almost every publisher we worked with,

there was some degree of conflict

and that took us down in the end.

- Today is a culmination of about three years of planning.

We're filming an actual real film

called Bringing Back GoldenEye.

- I'm Dan Guest, I'm the director

of Bringing Back GoldenEye,

the mockumentary written by Jim Miskell,

all about the GoldenEye world championships.

It was the first thing I'd ever been good at,

never mind a game, and I was amazing at it.

So I've written two films about GoldenEye.

Obviously, this is the second one.

First was Going For GoldenEye.

I made it myself, basically wrote it,

directed it, produced it, made the costumes, edited it.

I made everything apart from hold the camera,

hold the boom, and act in it basically.

And I'd never do that ever again. It was very stressful.

Grant Kirkhope said it was the film of the year,

which, you know, what more could you want, really?

David Doak compared it to Spinal Tap, King of Kong.

I'm really happy that the Rare guys liked it.

I'm really, really proud of it just because I did it,

you know, end of the day,

a lot of people can say they're going to do stuff,

but I'll put my money where my mouth is.

And I went through and did it.

And I saw it all the way through.

But now I've hired a lovely crew and producers

and everything and lots of lovely actors and,

yeah, they're making an awesome film.

It's written by a massive fan.

Jim's just written a great story with

a lot of little inside jokes and obviously David Doak's involved.

And it's just a great nostalgia trip for fans of the game.

- What we're filming these next couple of days

is the world championships interior parts of the film.

There'll be a hundred extras in,

and we've got a stage full of

new competitors and characters.

So it's going to be a big day,

and David Doak from the GoldenEye team

is coming to present the trophy.

Which is just mind blowing

because I've shot that guy in the head

so many times in the facility!

I guess the legacy of GoldenEye is the fans.

You know, and what they do with those memories

and how they keep it alive.

I mean like, look what's going on here.

To me, I'm hopefully contributing to the legacy

of GoldenEye and people enjoy what I'm doing

because, you know, I think it's important

that we tell stories based on video games.

You know, we're the first couple

of generations where that's our entertainment.

And so I'm celebrating this game

that's a big part of my life.

- It's really interesting when you look

at the James Bond games that came after GoldenEye.

The Eurocom Bond games were pretty competent.

Some of the more vehicular-based,

like some of the other ones were trying to do some of

the stuff that GoldenEye did, but failed.

GoldenEye's the one that people keep coming back to.

When in doubt, do a GoldenEye.

So EA did this with GoldenEye Rogue Agent.

You worked for the villains and there's kind

of almost like a mob war,

like you're working with the villains

as they kind of fight against each other.

And it was called GoldenEye because

he actually has a golden eye,

and Activision did the same thing after Quantum of Solace,

was basically a Call of Duty with a bit of a Bond skin.

They did the GoldenEye 007 re-imagining for Wii

to try and tap in that nostalgia

because that's the game that people remember.

That's the game that people love.

Who here would say that it's one of

the greatest shooters of all time?

- Everybody. - It set the standard.

- Problem is, as good as some of these games were,

none of them match GoldenEye.

- Nobody ever got close to kind of

bringing home that magic again.

I think by calling it GoldenEye

and then releasing a game that

is not in beat or in tune with what made

GoldenEye so special, I think upset a lot of people.

I think a lot of people were expecting a one-to-one remake,

but that's not what they got.

The XBLA remake, for a lot of us,

we had heard rumblings about it.

Sounds like it was almost at 100%,

like it sounds like it was pretty much ready to go.

It was written about

absolutely by every major gaming publication

and it even actually did hit a couple

of mainstream press as well.

Yes, I was there, I was part of the staff

when the news broke about a GoldenEye

release for the Xbox Live Arcade.

I think what made the Rare employee want to do it

was I don't think it had anything to do with anger,

I don't think it had anything to do with spite,

I think it was...

the intention was to get it out there

so that the world could see it.

- Just the way those leaks were released,

by almost like a double agent.

- It's such a shame that we never got

the GoldenEye HD remake that was rumored

for Xbox 360, I think it was.

So it was going to be a HD version of GoldenEye 64,

all the levels you remember, but with kind of

much more realistic graphics and online multiplayer,

and the problem is at the time, it was such a legal mess.

- We're talking, you know, three, four companies

that need to all see eye to eye

and get a proper piece of that pie.

- Microsoft owned Rare and Rare owned the game,

except GoldenEye 64 was published by Nintendo,

so Nintendo had the rights to that game

because Rare worked for them and was licensed.

It was all licensed by them,

except Activision at the time had the James Bond license.

Just became this massive,

you've got three companies arguing over

who does and doesn't have the rights to it.

And it meant that ultimately it never came out.

People who grew up on GoldenEye are now

trying to make the remake that they didn't get.

I mean, we had the Quake engine

and the Doom engine that we, you know,

and yet saw some impressive mods

that were being made from those engines.

But then Source engine came along.

- GoldenEye: Source is this project

that is totally fan made that is built

on the Source engine by Valve.

So the engine that ran Half-Life 2.

GoldenEye: Source is a remake

of the multiplayer component of GoldenEye.

They have essentially re-imagined

the GoldenEye levels to be remastered

to make it look more like the movie.

It's higher res textures, higher polygon count models.

All the weapons are redone, sound effects, and music even,

and all in the spirit of let's get our favorite

kind of couch death match game online

so that we can play it, you know,

with people from all over the world.

So we didn't get the remake that we want.

We constantly hear these rumblings in the industry

about how there is a GoldenEye out there,

remake that is done. It's just not being released.

The inability for the corporations to

figure out a way to get a remastered version of GoldenEye

out has created a vacuum

into which fans have fallen

and they're making their own projects.

You know, their sort of black label versions.

I am Curtis Higgins.

I am co-creator of GoldenEye: Source.

GoldenEye: Source is a adaptation

of the original Nintendo 64 game. We started in 2004.

The team has touched all corners of the globe.

We currently have members from Canada, US,

Switzerland, UK, Spain, Australia, Brazil.

- Says something about the fondness that people

hold for this game that they would dedicate

so much of their time to recreating it,

you know, either for their own pleasure,

but also probably for younger generations.

- The cool thing about indie development

is you can either make something yourself

or get one or two or three or half a dozen

of your friends and build something with tools

that are free or cheap and widely available.

- You can learn how to 3D model

with free open source software now.

You can learn, you know, Unreal Engine, Unity,

these are free to play around with game engines.

So now we have these tools,

these game development tools, that we never had before.

What's interesting to see is how these tools

are being utilized by people who grew up playing GoldenEye.

And so that democratization of the tools

is kind of leveling this whole field

and making these projects possible.

In the end, it's just a group of people

who absolutely love the original game

and they just want to bring an updated,

modern version to people who love it.

- No other game that you play,

where you're playing Call of Duty or another game,

and you're like, oh, I really hate the way this happens,

all of a sudden a developer or somebody pops up and goes,

oh, I'll change that next week.

Next thing you know, all the problems

you had with the game are now fixed.

Those teams that are kind of off the leash

and can do what they want without fear of, you know,

failing any focus tests or anything like that.

Sometimes I feel like the corporatization

of it all has sucked a bit of the creativity out of it.

That's what I feel.

I like that kind of gamers making games for gamers model.

I kind of feel that's a great way to do it.

- We've had a few members, they reached out

to Dr. Doak on Twitter,

we arranged a session where we were able to play.

He came in, we played with him. He played with the team.

We were only expecting him to play for about an hour.

And he ended up staying for about five hours.

It was definitely a dream of mine to

show my work to an original developer.

Modding provides an outlet for your creativity.

It allows you to try and fail

and you just get to have fun.

GoldenEye is still very alive

and well in the modding scene.

You know, when Elon Musk unveiled the cyber truck,

it was like a day or two after that

that someone modded the truck

into the streets level and even had, you know,

a low poly Elon Musk in there that

actually spoke to the character in the game.

It's like, it's just so wonderful that

that kind of stuff is out there.

The GoldenEye modding scene

has really exploded with so many different custom levels.

There's new sounds, there's new characters,

there's new weapons, there's new music.

- One of the things I really love

about GoldenEye 007 is that there's still

this community around the world.

They're making mods for the game.

- What people can do nowadays is practically endless.

It's constantly evolving.

What you see one year, the next year will be even greater.

There's mods where people have

completely changed the style of the game,

the timeframe, the genre,

and making world war type games

where you might still be Bond,

but you're taking on Nazis

and you're going through old hangars and streets,

and you're using these classic weapons

that sound extremely realistic and accurate

to the original representation,

but then there's other ones that base themselves

on something completely different.

- Everything in the game, from wall textures

to weapons, to characters, to items,

has been changed.

- It still has the same physics and controls and engine,

but it takes on a whole new life.

- These projects are just amazing efforts.

And it's all in these small modding

communities where they crop up.

It's a very close knit community

and that's awesome. A lot of people willing to share

and promote other people's projects

and keen to see other people in industry

and other developers' projects do really well.

We were all helping each other.

Anybody would come up with an idea

and if they didn't have the thought process

of how to possibly do it,

they might pass it on to somebody else

who is more experienced and they can try it out

and they have different opinions of their own.

And we were all just kind of banking off

each other to come up with as many cool

new discoveries as we could.

And it just really blew the game apart.

- When you want to talk about the future of gaming

and the company or group of people

who are going to move the needle

or take the next evolutionary step,

it probably won't be AAA.

- I think innovation has now moved from AAA

to the indie scene because the indie scene

is basically what Rare was back in the nineties.

It's small teams, pretty inexperienced,

doing it out of the love for making

something that they want to make.

In 2012, following the lackluster 007 Legends,

Activision abandoned the Bond license.

James Bond would be absent from video game

store shelves for nearly 10 years,

and discovering the magic formula

of GoldenEye's success remains elusive to this day.

Nobody ever got close to

kind of bringing home that magic again.

And that's, you know, because maybe it was,

everybody tried to take what GoldenEye

had created and tried to replicate it.

And so it kind of felt like more up-to-date,

but kind of cheaper copies of GoldenEye.

What we didn't see was a lot of innovation

in the newer Bond games that really

kind of maybe also adapted with what James Bond

was becoming in the Pierce Brosnan era.

I often say, you know,

when I'm explaining to newcomers to the industry,

that I think a lot of great games

are not necessarily the result of a great person in charge

or a great team making the game,

but they kind of reflect a great environment

that allows them the flexibility to experiment.

- It was about eight people.

In my experience, later in the games industry

was once you get to teams which are bigger

than say the size of a sports team,

that network of interpersonal connections gets fuzzier.

And also you end up with a hierarchy

because you have to have some kind of production hierarchy.

So people don't feel that empowered.

Somebody, anyone on the team could have an idea

and within an hour we could all have discussed it.

So we were very agile.

- You definitely feel the presence

of corporations a lot more.

A lot of the most prominent UK developers

are owned by massive publishers

or have been owned and shut down by massive publishers.

Rare is owned by Microsoft, and all right,

they're allowed to do their own thing,

but they are very much doing

their own thing on Microsoft's payroll.

- Things have become a little bit more corporate and safe.

Generally, I think that's true of all game development.

Some of the risks that are taken in GoldenEye

just wouldn't fly in this day and age.

Going back to that inexperienced team,

small team, you know, movie license,

even the freedom that they had with the license

these days wouldn't happen, you know,

to be able to kind of include stuff

from previous Bond films, you know, characters,

to actually go on the movie set,

photograph everything, going back to that

and the idea of perfect storm,

everything kind of just aligned to create

this wonderful experience.

- The size of their team in many respects was a strength.

You know, they didn't have the problem

of having sort of too many shifts.

They didn't really have the problem of too many layers

of management that a lot of AAA games have these days.

And they didn't really have anyone

telling them what they should do, or more importantly,

they didn't really have anyone telling them

what they couldn't do, but they just did everything.

And they just found a way.

- Everything that I've done since, obviously,

comes from the fact that Martin Hollis

walked into my room that morning and I said yes.

And I shudder when I think about

what would have happened if I had gone, eh. You know!

- When people are successful,

they're generally successful because they worked hard

and they have ability, but they've always been lucky.

You know, that's the thing that they don't tell you.

- If you didn't have any one of us

on the actual team, you wouldn't have got the same game.

- It was a great project to work on.

'Cause it was a small close knit team

who were working with a great license.

It's a once in a lifetime opportunity.

We had enormous fun.

- It was the right people at the right time.

It really was. The fact we all loved Bond, I loved Bond,

we all just loved Bond, you know, so

you just put the extra effort in, didn't you?

- People keep coming up to me and telling me

I've changed their childhood

or taken their childhood.

- It's surreal that after all this time

it's still a thing that we're talking about.

It was the first thing that I did after leaving uni.

It was literally more than half of my life ago.

And here we are talking about it.

- Over 23 years in or something

and people will still remember it fondly

and have questions about it.

- Although it frustrates the hell out of me

that that's the only thing people remember you for, you know,

it's still nice that you've done that thing

and people go, that was my game.

- GoldenEye in one word for me, is fun.

Simple as that, because

it was just fun to play from start to finish.

- Bond. It's just so very, very Bond.

- One word.

Evolutionary.

In terms of video games,

and me. It evolved me.

It changed me. It changed exactly who I am now.

It's...

No other video game will get the chance to do that again.

- There was something very special, that...

some kind of spark, some kind of life that GoldenEye had

that these other Bond games didn't quite get,

as close as they came.

- Even 20 years later, there's a certain,

you know, je ne sais quoi about it, but...

Yeah, if somebody has a better answer,

I'd be very interested in that.

- I'm so glad that I am my age now

because I don't want to sound patronizing or condescending,

but if you've got a multiplayer game,

just go round your friend's house and play it.

Don't play it online. Don't. I sound really old.

But just sit next to 'em on a couch

with two other people or five people,

six people, and just enjoy the game,

as well as your...

your bodies being next to each other.

- You hear all these stories about how people

have met and Dave was halfway across the world

and because of our mutual love of a game,

we happened to meet, and that's insane.

- GoldenEye: Source became this big thing,

and then that brought us together

now that we're young adults

and now we're married

and have a house because of that game.

- To think that if we'd never met in that game,

we'd never have met in person.

It just keeps coming back

into our lives in some kind of degree.

- It grabbed people.

I've seen people come and go,

and they come back and they come back

and they come back because they can't stay away from it.

They might go away from it for a couple years,

but something about it always pulls them back in.

- In the office at IGN, every day,

we would boot up GoldenEye at the end of the day,

and then people would forget to go home.

It's lovely that people still loved it.

It's lovely that we had such an effect,

that people clearly enjoyed playing it so much.

You know, you don't think about that when you're making it,

we were having fun playing it. We knew we liked it.

And you hope that other people will like it.

- It's just this entire era for me

of just having fun with a game that you bought

and there wasn't anything else to buy for it.

No microtransactions, no expansions,

everybody had the same game.

You just had to sit in front of the console,

pick up a controller, and away you go.

- I mean, some people stormed out the house

like almost in tears that they lost GoldenEye matches.

You know what I mean? Because they were like, yeah,

I'm the best at GoldenEye.

Come round Will's on Saturday and see what happens.

You got destroyed, didn't you?

Yeah, and they just walk away,

and you're like, see you next week?

Yeah. See you...

We've been talking about this game for so long.

A game from the olden times.

...most beloved licensed video games ever made.

GoldenEye 007 for Xbox Live...

In early 2021, something remarkable happened.

The shelved GoldenEye remake leaked onto the internet.

After being locked away for over a decade,

a full play through of the much anticipated remake

was streamed online by the world's most prominent

GoldenEye streamer, Graslu00.

Almost a quarter of a century after its release,

players all around the world came together

once again to reconnect over their favorite game.

Global news outlets beamed fresh GoldenEye news

into living rooms as the rights holders

could only watch on as the sales

the remake might've made vanished.

Deep into the 21st century,

nearly 25 years after its original release,

the impact is undeniable.

Rare's GoldenEye 007 lives on.

# No time to waste, feel the silvery shake #

# You got the guts to try #

# To be the best, better or play the rest #

# You know it, to be the Golden Child #

# You better shoot straight, there ain't no debate #

# It takes a steely eye #

# Flick of the wrist, guess a hit or miss #

# Or then it's somebody's time to die #

# GoldenEye #

# It's gonna get you #

# GoldenEye #

# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #

# GoldenEye #

# So take the pain and realise #

# GoldenEye #

# There's no escape from GoldenEye #

# Can't keep your nerve, you'll get all you deserve #

# If you can hold the line #

# She lacks a will, bring a thrill of the kill #

# That'll keep you pumped up, adrenalised #

# This ain't no game #

# Don't be fooled by the name, no, no, no #

# This is a way of life #

# So strap on in, it's about to begin #

# The victor will run the golden mile #

# Run the golden mile #

# GoldenEye #

# It's gonna get you #

# GoldenEye #

# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #

# GoldenEye #

# So take the pain and realise #

# GoldenEye #

# There's no escape from GoldenEye #

# GoldenEye #

# It's gonna get you #

# GoldenEye #

# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #

# GoldenEye #

# Take the pain and realise #

# GoldenEye #

# There's no escape, there's no escape #

# GoldenEye #

# It's gonna get you #

# GoldenEye #

# Yeah, it's got you in its sights #

# GoldenEye #

# Take the pain and realise #

# GoldenEye #

# There's no escape from GoldenEye #