Trivia / GoldenEye (1997)

• Creator-Driven Successor: The game ultimately received two. The first was Perfect Dark, which uses the same game engine and some assets, and has overall similar gameplay as a Spy Fiction-themed shooter, albeit with a much more science-fiction edge. Several of the developers behind the game later left Rare to form Free Radical, who made TimeSplitters, which is also similar in gameplay.
• Creator's Oddball: While Nintendo has dabbled with publishing some licensed games, this is the only one to be a movie tie-in. It's also one of their most realistic games and an FPS, a game genre they've rarely touched since.
• Dueling Works: With fellow N64 FPS Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.
• Dummied Out:
  • A number of unused skins for the St. Petersburg civilians and female variants of both the civilian and scientist NPCs exist, all of which can be seen in the final casting reel after the credits but never show up during gameplay. According to the fellas at The Cutting Room Floor, the varied civilian models were cut down to just one due to the already high texture-memory use in the map alone, and consequently were left out as leaving them in would make the level's performance unplayable.
  • A number of alternate, more frantic music tracks for several levels are present in the files, but not played in-game due to bugs, oversights, or just not having the room (the game only supports 2 music tracks per level). Many of them can be heard in the multiplayer mode as tracks are randomly played.
  • A multiplayer-only character model is a Russian police officer ("St. Petersburg Guard"), which is believed to have been intended to be fought in "Statue Park" and "St. Petersburg Streets". It isn't known why this enemy model wasn't used in the campaign, though most fans presume that the famously protective Eon Productions objected to James Bond killing police officers.
  • Female Moonraker Elite guards were designed for the Aztec single player level, though according to character designer Brett Jones, they had to be cut because they got word from EON Productions/MGM that Xenia was the only female character they could use as a villain for the game's story, and didn't want to have James Bond kill female Mooks.
  • Dam, Cradle, and Statue were originally designed as two- or three-player multiplayer levels, complete with weapon spawns and player start points, but they were cut/repurposed at the last moment with the multiplayer spawns disabled; it's why Cradle has three walkways, while the real antenna only had one. Frigate was another such level, which was named in the betas as "Destroyer", which also explains why the French La Fayette-class frigate actually appears to be an American Kidd-class destroyer. The XBLA version would have included these levels as intended, owing to the more powerful hardware of the Xbox 360.
  • A minor example; the "Egyptian" level was intended to have its sky turn red after killing Baron Samedi twice, but a bug in the code prevents this from occurring.
• Executive Meddling: As pointed out by co-designer Martin Hollis, Nintendo had a hand in toning down the violence of the game, the most notable change being the removal of the blood you'd expect when killing an enemy—although they kept the Bond franchise's "Blood-flowing-down-the-screen-as-you-die" aspect intact AND enemies having bullet wound exactly where you shoot, a feature which many contemporary shooters lacked. It only made it a more faithful adaptation in the end, as the film also kept its firefights bloodless.
• Inspiration for the Work: The devs took a lot from Virtua Cop when making the game (such as enemies reacting differently depending on where they were shot), almost making it Rail Shooter like its inspiration. Creator Martin Hollis even describes the aim function as a "Virtua Cop mode".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For the longest time, the game had not seen any kind of rerelease since its original run, due to ownership of the game being split between Nintendo, Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios (of which Rare is a subsidiary) and Eon Productions, for several reasons:
  • Back during The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games, Rare was working on a port for the Xbox 360 after Microsoft and Eon Productions came to an agreement, but Nintendo of Japan reportedly wouldn't allow it, leading to the port's cancellation. Reggie Fils-Aimé in 2006 also claimed Nintendo was "exploring all the rights issues" to bring the game to the Wii's Virtual Console, but since that never came to fruition, it can be assumed Microsoft in turn wouldn't allow Nintendo to have the game on just their console. A 2020 interview with Adam Foshko of Activision revealed that EON and MGM were notorious for placing restrictions on games that, while keeping Bond games "in-character", would greatly restrict what the rerelease could do.
  • With Nintendo and Microsoft forging a Friendly Rivalry by the end of The New '10s following a leadership change at Xbox Game Studios, leading to a number of Microsoft-owned games and characters appearing on the Nintendo Switch and in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, it can be assumed that the only roadblock left in a rerelease in The New '20s is Eon Productions and MGM, who have since taken their extremely sweet time on Bond video games after previous license owner Activision crapped that bed with 007 Legends in 2012, only putting the Bond license back on the market for IO Interactive to grab 8 years after the fact in 2020.
  • On February 2021, a hacker called "Fyodorovna" (after Natalya's middle name) managed to leak a near-complete beta build of the XBLA version online for the general public, allowing players to see just how far ahead it was. All that needed to be done on the beta was some music and graphical fixes, as said beta is fully playable, down to even having an achievement list. It even has a button toggle to switch between the game's original N64 graphics and the XBLA remastered graphics, though as the Perfect Dark rerelease had such a feature that was Dummied Out of the final release, it was likely a debug feature.
  • Finally averted in January 2023 with a remaster for Xbox Game Pass and a widescreen-supported rerelease of the original N64 version for Nintendo Switch Online.
• Killer App: The game's split screen multiplayer made it a standout for the Nintendo 64, especially since it was novel for an FPS in its time period. The high praise from reviews and what was considered a good singleplayer campaign also helped. If you owned a N64 you needed to buy GoldenEye. The game even ended up the third best-selling title for the system.
• Sleeper Hit: The game received almost no pre-release coverage, had a lackluster showing at E3 1997, and was based on a movie that came out two years prior. It was developed almost as an afterthought, with the development team consisting of 10 inexperienced college students, most of whom expected the game to be overshadowed by the technologically superior Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. Nobody thought much of anything from it. But then it turned out to be an immediate smash hit both critically and commercially, becoming the third best-selling game for the N64 (and the second-best selling N64 game in North America, behind only Super Mario 64) and a popular multiplayer title.
• Throw It In!: The multiplayer was a major afterthought, and would have not been in the game at all if it wasn't for a programmer or two that decided to create it at the last minute. Not only was the multiplayer made in just a few hours, it was done without Rare or Nintendo knowing about it before the game was ready to be released to the market. Rather than reprimand the programmers who coded the multiplayer, they basically said "Screw it, keep it in". The decision would prove to be a good one since not only was the multiplayer touted as one of the best things of the game, but it would also set the standard of First-Person Shooter multiplayer games on consoles.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • Rumors persisted about the purpose of the island across from the Dam at Arkhangelsk. Using a Gameshark code to walk there reveals that it has nothing but a non-working turret gun and an empty guard tower. Apparently the mission was originally going to take you to that island, but the developers felt it broke the flow of the level too much for a completely uninteresting detour, so they removed any way to access it; the assets they'd already created for the objective were simply left in to save time.
  • The Citadel, an unfinished level that was the source of many hoaxes through the community, was thought to be a myth... but was later discovered to really exist in the game's code as a testing level.
  • Then there's the infamous "All Bonds" cheat that was said to unlock former Bond actors as multiplayer characters, though this had some truth in being cut content.
  • There are frequent rumors of Oddjob and May Day appearing in singleplayer, or of Xenia showing up for a boss fight in the Frigate level. In this case, the rumors came from the fact that the instruction manual says Oddjob and May Day do show up at some point and encourages players to try and find them, and the mission briefing for Frigate outright says Xenia is there. The latter might simply be a leftover from the movie, where she did show up on the yacht (the movie's equivalent of the Frigate) before boarding the Tiger helicopter.
  • Another one caused by the instruction manual is mention of a weapon called the "Spyder", which was often assumed to be one of the weapons shown on the back of the case. The confusion stems from the terminally-useless Klobb, originally meant to be called the Spyder until they realized that was also the name of a real-life paintball gun^note a lesser example involves rumors of another weapon called the "Skorpion", which is just the Klobb's real-life name; this name change came about late enough in development that the manual still refers to the gun as the Spyder. The weapon on the back of the case is actually one of the beta models for the KF7 Soviet rifle.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The game was originally intended to be an on-rails shooter in the vein of Virtua Cop, before it became a first-person shooter. The game's unconventional aiming, where the crosshair is not locked to the center of the screen as in most shooters before or since, is likely a remnant of this early plan. It's also rumored some of the more linear levels, particularly Train, were designed around this idea.
  • It was intended that former Bond actors Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Timothy Dalton would have been available in multiplayer as playable characters, and also would have been used in the Aztec and Egyptian bonus missions. Unfortunately, Rare was forced to cut them late in development due to legal concerns...but not before the developers had a 100-point deathmatch between the four Bonds.
    Dave Doak: Right near the end of development, a guy came in from EON who owned the Bond licence and saw we had put in Connery, Dalton and Moore as well as Brosnan. We thought it would be great for marketing and even some screenshots went out with Connery in his white tuxedo. Then an edict came down from on high and we had to get rid of the other Bonds, so on the day we had to take them out we played this epic deathmatch – first to a hundred kills – which went on for about three hours. Mark Edmonds played as Moore and won by one kill. It went down to the wire…
  • According to co-designer Martin Hollis, Nintendo was dissatisfied with the violent content with the game and allegedly tried to make it so the villains aren't actually killed. At one point, Shigeru Miyamoto suggested to the development team that the game end with Bond shaking hands with the enemies at a hospital. Say what you want about that, but that's hilarious as hell right there. This is in fact why the game features the cast credits at both the beginning and end - to give the illusion that the characters are actually actors and thus not actually being killed.
  • An Updated Re-release of the game for the Xbox Live Arcade was in development and even partially completed. However, it fell afoul of legal issues; Microsoft, Rare (who at this point had been bought out by Microsoft) and Activision (who owned the Bond game license at the time) were all on board, but even if they were somehow able to get Nintendo on board as well, the real hurdles would be MGM Productions and EON, due to the in-character restrictions they'd demand that would hurt the rerelease's faithfulness. This led to Rare and Microsoft using the engine they had created for the game for an Updated Re-release of Perfect Dark, while Activision would completely remake the game using Daniel Craig as James Bond. For a long while, the only footage of said version was a low quality video of the Silo level in 2007. This all changed on February 2021 when a user calling themselves "Fyodorovna" leaked a 90% complete closed beta of the XBLA version on the internet for the general public to play, preceded a day earlier by a playthrough of the game by notable GoldenEye streamer Graslu00.
  • An interview with Martin Hollis also revealed that they had planned to include a ZX Spectrum emulator within the game in the guise of an arcade machine that would have allowed players to play Rare's ZX Spectrum games, but the idea was scrapped due to time constraints. The coding for the emulator is still in the game itself, but no games are present to use it with. This was later kept for Donkey Kong 64, giving players the ability to play the original Donkey Kong and Rare's own Jetpac.
  • Doing enough damage to Ouromov in the "Silo" level causes him to drop his briefcase, although it has no function. At one point, picking it up was meant to be an objective and would have contained plans for either the prototype helicopter or the Goldeneye satellite.
  • A massive amount of unused items exist in the game code in varying states of completion. Many of them are various gadgets from past Bond films, as well as the exploding pen from the Goldeneye film itself.
  • Ouromov's car in the "Streets" level was meant to appear in the opening cutscene, as a fully functional model and some pathing code for its AI exist in the files.

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