The Golden Touch – Edge Interviews the GoldenEye 007 Team
The following interview was originally published in Volume 53 of Edge Magazine from their Christmas 1997 edition.
It has been transcribed here for the purposes of posterity and preservation.
Destined for true classic status in years to come, GoldenEye is perhaps Rare’s most accomplished achievement to date. Edge met with the team responsible and spoke to some of it’s key members.
Perhaps more than any other title, GoldenEye is the greatest example of Rare’s creative and technical expertise, having pushed back the boundaries of videogames. It’s a title that seems to have captured the essence of 64bit gaming with unbridled sophistication, shunning the bright and breezy attitude of most N64 titles in favour an altogether more mature theme. In short, it’s a modern classic. Perhaps most suprisingly, it was created in the most part by individuals who hadn’t worked in videogame development before.
Edge met the team behind the project and spoke to three of its key members – Martin Hollis (game director/programmer), Dave Doak (software engineer/designer), and Karl Hilton (3D artist).
Edge: So, apart from the film (obviously), what were the main influences for GoldenEye?
Martin Hollis: We couldn’t pretend we didn’t play Doom a lot.
Karl Hilton: And Virtua Cop as well. It was pegged as being a Doom and Virtua Cop synthesis at the beginning.
Edge: And when exactly did the work on the project begin?
Dave Doak: Two and a half years ago. Well, no, probably getting towards three years ago now – it was January 1995. It was when we were first getting the emulators for the N64 chipset. I remember we didn’t actually have the actual hardware at the time. There was all the pain of changing over to new hardware.
Martin Hollis: It was just an enormous amount of trouble because we didn’t have the final hardware amd we were using Onyx emulators; we didn’t get much mileage out of them at all. Then we recieved an early build of the actual N64 hardware and we realised that it was quite different – it wasn’t an emulator any more, it was some approximation of an N64.
Edge: How long was it before you got the game engine running?
Martin Hollis: Probably about a year. It was a very long time because I remember in ’95 there wasn’t much of a game.
Edge: It was first shown at Shoshinkai on video, wasn’t it?
Karl Hilton: There was no gun on screen, no deaths, you got to travel around the archives and that was about it.
CONTROLLING JAMES BOND
Edge: What do you think separates GoldenEye from most firstperson PC games?
Martin Hollis: I guess the major difference is with the control system. It’s a fairly obvious remark, but an analogue controller makes a big difference. The analogue stick is good – it’s perfect, I suppose.
Edge: Yes, but it could be argued that using a mouse with a PC offers a similar degree of flexibility.
Martin Hollis: Yes, that’s true, but it’s not the sae because you keep having to move it back, whereas the N64’s stick re-centers.
Karl Hilton: There’s been a lot of stuff on the Net about why we haven’t got a jump or why we haven’t got a run button. Firstly, the analogue’s meant to be for running anyway – if you push forward you are running and if you look at the speed you’re going it’s actually quite realistic for running. Secondly, there are no more buttons left anyway for a run or a jump so you’d have to start doing strange combinations with things. You’d need a joypad with, say, 14 buttons if you want to get everthing that everyone wants in a PC game.
Martin Hollis: The worst thing about running is that everyone runs the while time anyway. On Quake you’ve got a configuration that says ‘run always’. Well, it’s like, what’s the point of having walking? It’s just completely redundant.
Edge: GoldenEye probably exploits the N64 controller to its fullest potential to date. How much thought went into that?
Martin Hollis: We went through a lot of control systems.
Edge: The default control actually seems the most awkward to get to grips with…
Karl Hilton: Do you think so? Because I hate the Turok-style one. The feedback we’re got back off the Net seems split 50/50. There are a lot of kids – most of the feedback is from America because they’ve been playing it for quite a while now – and half of them are saying the default setting is the best and the other half prefer the Turok one.
Martin Hollis: We did the Turok one last because basically we had a lot of control systems but everyone in testing, everyone at Rare, said ‘We think the default one is fine’ and most people seemed to be of the opinion we should take all the others out. But there were like two people at Rare that said ‘It would be good if it had one like Turok‘ so we said ‘Okay, we’ll do that’. We put that in last and I’m glad we did. I mean, we were seriously considering having no selection at all.
DETAIL TO DIE FOR
Edge: What feature in GoldenEye are you most proud of?
Dave Doak: All the things I did… [Laughs] No, there really are so many different things.
Martin Hollis: I’d say the overall detail. It’s unfair to single out one thing because there are a lot of innovative things: polygonal characters from the film, a polygonal multiplayer mode, etc.
Karl Hilton: I do like the shooting of different body parts. Trying to shoot someone in the backside is still one of the best pastimes.
Edge: How much hard work was that – presumably you implemented a lot of motion capture? Was that done in-house?
Karl Hilton: We had a system set up here.
Edge: Because it seems to be a whole lot more realistic than most animation in other games…
Martin Hollis: A great deal of effort was put into the motion capture and cleaning it up. It’s got some really sophisticated, technical blending and drawing of scenery and stuff – the soft fillets [soft skin] that Turok 2 is supposed to have are in GoldenEye, but we don’t think it necessary to make a big song and dance about it. And there are many other things like that we shan’t be mentioning.
Dave Doak: One of the things that seems to be enduring about it, as you were saying, is the detail – it’s nice to see people who played it and they’ll notice something that they hadn’t noticed before; that you can actually shoot things – objects around the floor, or something like that – which is something they weren’t expecting.
Karl Hilton: Or watching what the guards are doing when you don’t think you’re watching them, and they start yawning and swatting at flies. There’s a lot of stuff like that.
Edge: The attention to detail is impressive. How much of a part does the hardware play in this?
Martin Hollis: We set out with an unusual attitude which was simply that we’d just model the graphics and not even think about whether it was possible to put them on the system – partly borne out of practical considerations because we didn’t have any system – but we just carried blindly and…
Karl Hilton: It was my first game so I didn’t know what was required except that we were doing it in polygons. We didn’t have a system yet so I just sat down and started evolving the stuff from the films that we knew about and it just developed from there. And I think probably because none of us had done a game before, we didn’t worry too much about whether you could do this or not, or whether it had been done – we just thought: that would be a cool idea and that would be a cool idea, and we put it all in and when we finally got the stuff running we could see whether it was going to run or not.
Martin Hollis: It took a very long time to get the incredibly ambitious models running at a decent speed.
Dave Doak: The greatest struggles were driven by the film – if we’d sat down to it without those constraints of working to the film and things, we might have just stuck to building interiors all of the time. Things like the Dam and the Cradle – the Cradle’s just insanity. It’s like, why would you want to build something you can see all at once?
Karl Hilton: It’s basically got everything in it that you shouldn’t do in a 3D game [laughs], but it was important in the film and we had to have it at the end. It went through two or three stages of modeling before the final version. It got completely changed once and then it got cut down and then cut down again and then cut down again…
Edge: It must have been difficult to keep this level of detail and variety in a 96Mbit cartridge.
Martin Hollis: It used to be 380Mbits.
Edge: That would be good to play, have you got it here?
Martin Hollis: Well, it’s actually the same – it’s just compression, simply very good compression.
Karl Hilton: That’s why the game’s turned out well, I think, because we didn’t limit ourselves from the start, saying ‘Right, you can have 20 textures for this level, and you can have 20 textures for this level and that’s it’. We just built the levels and afterwards we’re like ‘This is a bit expensive, can you cut out a couple of things? I mean, St. Petersburg got quite a lot of textures cut out of it – it was a lot more adventurous than that originally. A couple of the other levels also had to be looked at but very little remodeling was done. Generally most of it went in as it was designed and as it was built. And a lot of it actually got made more expensive because over two years, the first stuff that was done started to look not as good as the later stuff we did, so I went back and redid the early stuff. So it went through several generations.
MULTIPLE BONDING
Edge: How did the fourplayer mode come about? It’s more accomplished than that of, say, Hexen 64, but was it still added quite late in the day?
Martin Hollis: I suppose it was, it was probably about March or something when I decided that it would be a very good idea despite the deadlines. Everyone was saying at that time that it wouldn’t be any fun with splitscreen, it wouldn’t be any good. And I was kind of listening to those remarks and believing them, but they turned out to be completely false because if you’re sitting beside the other three people, you can shout and scream at them – you can see their reactions in a way that you can’t when it’s on a network. It’s a shame you need a big TV to get the most out of it, though.
Karl Hilton: We spent many a late evening playtesting the multiplayer mode before it was finished.
Dave Doak: Even from the start, I remember the first night when we got it playing on fourplayer and it was running at 8Hz or something, and Bond was running around as if he was on a trolley, and everyone was Bond and it crashed every five seconds.
Edge: Were you not spreading your resources thinner by looking after both the oneplayer and the multiplayer game?
Martin Hollis: Well, we managed to fit it in. It was Stephen Ellis who had the task of implementing the multiplayer and he did an excellent job. I suppose in a sense the resources were spread thinner, yes, but not much thinner.
Edge: Perhaps the most world-renowned multiplayer game is Quake – was that a major influencing factor?
Martin Hollis: No, not at all.
Dave Doak: In fact we only played multiplayer Quake for the first time yesterday.
Karl Hilton: There’s been a lot of discussion on the Net about how multiplayer Quake is the best multiplayer thing you can play so we’ve been trying it out.
Edge: And what did you think of those claims?
Martin Hollis: It seems fun…. but I wouldn’t say I was bowled over.
Karl Hilton: There’s nothing original in there but, yes, it seemed good fun.
LIFE AT RARE
Edge: How would you describe Rare if you had to sum it up in one media-friendly soundbite?
Dave Doak: It’s just lots of people who are mad on games.
Martin Hollis: Everyone just has an incredible passion for games, and also has the best equipment – exactly what we want, exactly what we need.
Karl Hilton: We have a great working environment not only in terms of quality of where we are, but quality of the equipment that we use. You get what you need to do the job – it’s not a question of ‘Oh no, you can’t have this software because we can’t afford it’. If you need a certain item of software you’ll get it, and then you know you can do your job with it. That’s probably why we turn out some good quality stuff.
Martin Hollis: And why so people leave the company, as well.
Karl Hilton: I assume a game like GoldenEye is a major investment for a company like Rare. There are probably not a lot of companies out there that could put the sort of investment that we put into GoldenEye, but Nintendo were happy to let us get the game the way we wanted it. Although we had deadlines to meet, there wasn’t pressure saying ‘Right, stop now, let’s get it out’. We got it finished to a degree we were very happy with.
Edge: It must be one of the very few film liences that have really done any justice to the source material.
Karl Hilton: I think we were all quite nervous when we started, when they said, ‘Do you want to do James Bond type of game?’
Dave Doak: Yes, they’re usually the kiss of death, film licences.
Karl Hilton: It just made us more aware that we’d have to produce something very exceptional to try and break that our of that expectation, because we knew it would face that kind of ‘Oh, it’s a film licence’ – so you’ve got to make sure it is good, then.
Martin Hollis: It’ s just a question of aptitude to your work.
Edge: Had you worked at other companies before starting here?
Martin Hollis: Not in the software industry, no. By and large there are very few people at Rare who’ve worked at other software companies.
Karl Hilton: I was fresh out of university, I came from an architectural background. I did a BA in Architecture and spent a lot of time working with CAD systems and thought it was a lot more fun just doing nice graphics than actually designing buildings, so I went and did a computer graphics course in Bournemouth and then I looked around the software companies and Rare were the first to offer me a job. I came here and have had a great time ever since.
Martin Hollis: Architecture’s perfect…
Karl Hilton: It is, yes. [Laughs] I get to build all the things I’ve always tried to build and no one complains that it’s not plausible.