“GoldenEye 007: The Making of an N64 Classic”, by Alyse Knorr

 

I’ve written before about my love for Alyse Knorr’s Super Mario Bros. 3 from Boss Fight Books. That was back in the day, but the author herself recently sent along a copy of her new book about the N64 masterpiece GoldenEye 007. I’ll say right up front, it’s worth its weight in gold. Glad as I was to read it for free, I’d already bought it; I sent a copy to my friend as a birthday gift and was looking forward to talking about it with him. This despite the fact that personally I’m not much of a Bond fan. Never read the books and never got into the films or games (though I do have fond memories of the theme songs to Goldfinger and Never Say Never Again from watching the VHS tapes as a kid, and I love the send-up of the brand in Austin Powers).

GoldenEye 64, as it was colloquially known among my friends, never inspired in me anything close to the affection I feel for so many Nintendo classics, but I know from vicarious experience and from the stories Knorr tells how much this game meant to many people. So of course I was avid to review her book. In what follows, I’ll do my best to give an overview of the contents and discuss the material she presents, holding a middle ground between my bias in favor of Knorr as a writer and mildly against GoldenEye the game and the genre it helped to define, the console first-person shooter.

The Mario book opened with questions: 

Why does everyone love this game so much? Why do I love it so much? Why was it so incredibly successful?

I think they are still the right ones to ask, and still implicit in much of what Knorr is doing here in her investigation of GoldenEye. If pressed, though—and this did come up in a recent podcast appearance—Knorr would have to concede that the Bond game has not had quite the appeal or success of her beloved Mario, for all her love and nostalgia for them both. This time she accordingly adds a further question, specific to the case of GoldenEye:

But how did a game made by a team of complete rookies, against all odds, become the lifeblood of an entire genre?

The corollary she draws is important, as is the context in which the game appeared. Pursuing these three facets—namely, the team of rookies, the odds stacked against them, and the game’s influence on the console FPS—Knorr paints a brilliant portrait of the game’s development in (and prior to) the early days of the N64.

She has a privileged standpoint on the history. Knorr writes in her introduction that GoldenEye was “a rite of passage into adulthood and the last game of our collective era of innocence—a game as silly as it was violent, an artifact of another time.” Not only giving us the contemporary player perspective of the basement or dorm-room couch co-op experience, however, Knorr leverages extensive interviews with GoldenEye’s creative team and other research to transport us straight back to the British countryside of this polygonal Bond’s birth, and to the unique vantage of Nintendo’s 2nd-party developer, Rare.

Rare almost didn’t make the game at all. Wary of the baggage of the Bond franchise, then at a low point prior to the success of GoldenEye, they were nevertheless convinced by a new hire to take the project on. Martin Hollis, the team lead, came up in an environment in which the UK was already shifting from the first generation of “bedroom coders,” such as Rare founders the Stamper brothers, to a more institutional push for computer literacy (including a fascinating decade-long effort promoted by the BBC). In fact, Hollis was the first graduate of the world’s first computer science program at Cambridge. He also loved James Bond, and he assembled a team of similarly young, confident, and talented programmers at Rare’s rural headquarters, many of them Bond fans, to put together a move-tie-in game that would actually be good.

It is in the biographical sketches of Hollis and his team, and in the detailed breakdown of their day-to-day work of making the game, that Knorr’s account sets itself apart from other available histories and post-mortems on what made GoldenEye great. For example, there’s an Errant Signal video on the game as a “child of Doom” that explores many aspects of the gameplay and design considerations. But where Errant Signal can only speculate on the reasons for the team’s decisions, Knorr walks us through the decision-making process with all its false starts, work-arounds, and iterations. We hear about the delays to the pause interface, simulated by Bond’s wristwatch, being intentional, as were framerate slowdowns in preference to further limitations on gameplay and graphics. We also get the story behind the terrible Klobb, named after a key advocate for the game within the halls of Nintendo, Ken Lobb. (True to form, he gleefully points out that it’s great in certain multiplayer scenarios). There are web sources where you can see some of the design documents, like this original proposal from Hollis:

What Knorr’s book does differently, though, is to weave together these sources with insights from her interviews, comments from speeches, and analyses from previous studies alike into a coherent and seemingly definitive retrospective on the design and development of GoldenEye. All this is presented with sufficient lightness to keep the history from bogging down in an accumulation of facts, but with such a command of the facts that we move from topic to topic supported by a kind of inevitability. Of course, at many points, from the initial pitch to the multiplayer mode (a last-minute addition all but smuggled into the game) to the release and early struggles of the N64, the success of GoldenEye was anything but secure.

One of the most admirable qualities of Knorr’s writing is to challenge this aura of inevitability in hindsight, resonant with good memories, by layering in the tension of the actual utter contingency of the project, the various ways in which Hollis and the others were really making it up as they went along. She achieves this through a portrait of the game and its makers that is much more intimate and encompassing than the sum of its parts. We hear about the sorts of questions the team was asking amongst themselves: “What is the appropriate level of Humour? What is the appropriate level of Violence?” These questions were integral to the final experience, though it took them three years of work to realize it. In a way, the honesty and dedication with which they pursue them give us an answer to Knorr’s own questions from the beginning. They found the right balance of humor and violence, but also fun and difficulty, technical solutions and of-its-time-jankiness, to make GoldenEye a hit.

Rejecting “auteur theory,” instead letting experimentation inform their design and building on contributions from all members of the team, they had the freedom and the resources to be an “indie team making a AAA product” (in the words of the real-life Dr. Doak). Or as John Romero of Doom fame sees it, “They loved that game—you can tell. They put their all into all parts of that game. It’s why it’s great.” For instance, it was a member of the team, Duncan Botwood, who put his body on the line to create the motion capture for the game’s wide variety of pain and alarm animations. In the bonus chapter for the “00 Agent Edition” of the book, Knorr delves deep into the music and sound effects, just one more area where the team’s unprecedented access to and knowledge of the Bond franchise shines through.

Between the mini-bios, the jokes, and the whimsical and thoughtful justifications, the team’s distinct voices come through in the banter across the decades. The photos and images accompanying the storytelling reveal a crew like some kind of male nerd Spice Girls: astonishingly alive with “joyful naivete” (Doak again), technical wizardry, and camaraderie. We root for them in their efforts to overcome obstacles to completing GoldenEye, taking onboard Miyamoto’s critiques of the violence and leaning into the cheeky and juvenile campiness of the Bond mythos. After seeing Mario 64 and the system hardware and controller in action at last, two years into the development cycle and already way behind schedule, they finally take their shooter off the rails and get the movement, stealth, and scaling difficulty of objectives into something like a finished form. But we cheer them on just as much in their epic Super Bomberman bouts and lesser-known but evidently exhaustive studies of Nintendo’s house style in A Link to the Past. 

This playful and freewheeling aspect of the “perfectionist naughty schoolboys” is what is missing from subsequent console FPS series like Call of Duty. Whatever their merits, they lack the sense of humor and originality that Hollis and his team captured in GoldenEye. Perhaps this is why, despite spiritual successors like Perfect Dark and well-regarded fan mods like Goldfinger 64, there has never been a true sequel or series spun off of the original. While I can’t go so far as Tom Bissell, who calls it “the Ulysses of video games” (albeit like the Joyce novel it does feature a prominent toilet scene), I can see how GoldenEye “blasted open all these other avenues of possibility” yet was paradoxically impossible to follow up. Rare’s second-party stake was sold off from Nintendo and bought up by Microsoft. For reasons of business and creative differences not fully unpacked, Hollis and his team dispersed. I appreciate Knorr’s tracing the team’s post-Rare careers, but GoldenEye’s complex legacy of innovation, especially around genre conventions, violence (including misogyny), and “Humour” proves a little beyond the scope of her book.

If I were to give it a score, I’d hazard a 9/10 for Knorr’s in-depth look at GoldenEye. The writing is excellent, never going full Big Head Mode with the erudition, clear-eyed and yet profoundly informative about a halcyon era in video games. The wealth of information, anecdotes, and analysis is delightful. At times, though, I missed the superb pacing and evocative personal connections that marked her Mario 3 retrospective. But comparing just about anything to that highlight in the Boss Fight catalogue is like trying to play against Oddjob in multiplayer. Knorr’s latest is still a wonderful book for fans of the game, genre, and era.

PIXEL PERFECT

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Wesley Schantz coordinates the Video Game Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA.