When first asked by Nintendo to develop a movie tie-in to the 1995 James Bond flick, the team at Rare weren’t very eager. According to Rare’s Mark Betteridge, they "were trying to build [their] own IP", and they frankly weren’t overjoyed at idea that the film tie-in would mean "a lot of ownership by the film company." Nevertheless, development began, but there wasn’t "an awful lot of faith in the game around the company", especially after a lacklustre showing at E3 1997.

Rare’s George Andreas, who oversaw development, saw a build of the game about four months from release and thought to himself that it was "a bit of a mess." However the core members of the dev team weren’t ready to give up on the game just yet. After several lengthy delays, partly because the dev team decided to incorporate a multiplayer feature to the game to demonstrate the N64’s 4-player capabilities, Nintendo wrote a letter to Rare suggesting they cancel the title. But thanks to the video game gods, that letter never made it to the core development team, and GoldenEye was eventually released to a flood of critical praise and awards.

GoldenEye 007 will be reborn once more in Eurocom’s enhanced remake for the Wii, which will be out by Christmas.

Source: EDGE via GamerZines