Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Goldeneye 007 With - John Gruber

Episode Date: October 19, 2024

Did Nintendo try to kill GoldenEye 007 before it was completed? Why did Shigeru Miyamoto keep telling the development team to tone down the violence. And why did the famous multiplayer aspect of the game almost didn’t happen? It’s slappers only on Rad History, because we’re diving into the history of THE game of the late 1990s, GoldenEye 007. With Special Guest: John Gruber Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Did Nintendo try to kill Golden I-O-S-7 before it was completed? Why did Shigero Miyamoto keep telling the development team to tone down the violence? And why did the famous multiplayer aspect of the game almost not happen?

It's slappers only on Rad History because we're diving into the history of the late 1990s Golden I-O-7. Welcome to Rad History and 80s-90s podcast recounting the history of the last two decades of the 20th century. The last time things felt relatively normal and chill a bit. I'm your host Brian McCullough. Most people know my guest, who you're the first one to laugh at that line, John. Know my guest, John Gruber, from his website Daring Fireball, but also from his various podcasts, including the talk show. And dithering, John, welcome to the show.

Glad to be here. John, I assume that you, like I, have a soft spot in your heart for this particular game. So let's just start off by telling me your history with the Golden Eye. game. Oh, that's a good one. So in the night, this is probably another topic. You showed me a topic list. Was there a Genesis versus Super Nintendo one? Yes, we'll get there eventually. I was on team Genesis in my college years, 91 through 96. just through the serendipity of which other guys on my dorm floor had which consoles, and it was very genesis-e biased. And it was a huge, huge Genesis John Madden football fanatic.

And, you know, ended up buying my own Genesis for our room and played a bunch of Genesis games. And, you know, like any of those platform wars, you end up getting at least slightly radicalized against the other side. And then the other thing that I still have strong feelings about to this day was that the original Nintendo entertainment system, the classic one, the first one for the home, had a terrible controller. It was a sharp angled rectangle that if you started playing a game for any amount of time, it really hurt. your hands. I really hated the controller. And so I was, you know, and the Genesis had a much, you know, I guess Nintendo fixed that with the Super Nintendo, but I just was a Genesis guy. And then the nine, you know, coming towards the end of the 90s, got out of college. And my roommate and I were thinking, well, we got to get a new video game system. And it was either, and Sega was out of it.

So whatever attachment I had to, I mean, I guess they had Dreamcast or whatever, but it didn't seem rather it. It seemed like our choices were the original PlayStation or Nintendo 64. And I don't know what led us to get the Nintendo. It seemed like a very close call. There was something about the Sony look from the original PlayStation that looked kind of sharp, oversharpened. and the Mario 64 game, which came with Nintendo, looked awesome. And it was, it was a great game. So we ended up getting for our, you know, two 20-something guys, Bachelor Pad, the Nintendo 64.

And I'm laughing because we loved the Mario game. I think, man, there was like one or two other games. The Zelda. Yeah, I was just never a Zelda guy, though. So I think we had it, but I never could get into it. Forgive me, Zelda fans. But what I remember really, really, the timeline might be off here because we might have already owned Golden Eye. But the distinct memory I had was this was like peak blockbuster video years.

And my roommate and I were big movie fans. And usually would go, there was a great chain here in Philadelphia, TLA, Theater of the Living Arts. where we'd go to rent movies because they had a much better selection of like indie films. But we'd also, you know, also had Blockbuster cards and Blockbuster had video games, which was a fantastic way to try video games, especially on a early 20s person budget. And we would go in to Blockbuster and look at the selection of games for Nintendo. And it was all just like kid stuff, you know, it just really, really seemed like G-rated stuff.

And then on the PlayStation side, it was these cool racing games and cool, you know, first-person shooter games and you name it. It just, it was like, oh, man, I just thought,

we picked the wrong console. But then there was Golden Eye. And I don't know that it made up for the total discrepancy in the library, but it single-handedly came close. Like, we liked that game so much that if somebody had super glued it into the console, we probably wouldn't have noticed or complained too much. So it's amazing how much of what that story,

how that's going to be echoed in the research that I did. I'm going to answer some of those questions, and then you're proving out some of the things that I found. I'm going to mention real quick, And by the way, I want to shout out the Blockbuster video episode that M.G. Siegler and I just did because we talked about renting video games and how important that was to sort of, you know, kick the tires of a video game before you were going to spend $60 on it. I know that's common now to have, you know, a trial level and things like that to download. But that's how we did it before you could do this. You couldn't download anything back then. Well, now, so I went to college in 96. And when I get there, it's all sorts of quake parties and things. like that where we would run, you know, wires to each other's dorms and, and, uh, have land parties and

and all that great stuff. But, uh, after moving off campus, 97, 98, this is the golden era of golden eye and it was all golden eye. And, and it was easier to do because you didn't have to, uh, create a land party. You could just grab four controllers and get a bunch of people on a couch and go. So I have a similar memory to that sort of stuff. Can I ask you, we should, I want to do this now because I'm afraid we're going to forget it. Let's talk about, you know, what was your favorite level? What was your favorite character? Is using odd job a cheat? Like, what do you remember in terms of that sort of stuff? Hmm. I don't remember having, oh, like a level for multiplayer? Well, or no, or like, oh,

I'll give you mine. I loved when people would play only proximity minds because it felt like a chess match to me to try to trap people in rooms. But then other people are like, well, only golden gun single shot or only sniper rifles or whatever. So what was like your preferred mode of play? You told me I could do this. I have not refreshed my own memories. I seem to recall what was the one in like an Egyptian pyramid? Right. Well, now listen, I do not have a list of the levels in front of me.

I think calling on that, you know, somehow they got the, I don't even know if they got the rights, you're probably going to cover this, but it was like, you know, for multiplayer, they got a, you know, like you said, odd job. They had, you know, they had jaws, a bunch of the classic bond villains and settings. And I guess the Egyptian one comes from one of the Roger Moore movies, probably spy who love me. I forget which one where he went to Egypt. But it always seemed like a fair multiplayer level. But I think part of what made the game so good, both single player and multiplayer, it didn't seem

like any one in particular stood out. And we would definitely, my roommate and I would play all of the weird rules, you know, proximity mines only or sniper rifles. only, whatever, and just cycle through. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I don't think we do. That was a little too dumb, yeah.

Yeah, a little too. That was, I mean, we tried. But I don't really have a fond memory of any, or a particular fondness for anyone. It just seemed like, let's just keep cycling through them, right? And it's the variety, even though we'd played them all dozens of times each, there was enough, you know, because we didn't keep going to the same core level, it, it, it, it, felt like there was some kind of novelty still, or variety, at least, if not novel. And like, that's the key to these things. Like, why can Fortnite last? I mean, they refresh maps and things like that.

But I'll use a Nintendo example, like the current Mario Kart, they added a whole ton of levels. But the thing about that is, is like, you can replay it 10,000 times. You can play a certain level a thousand times, and it's still, you have a different experience every time. So, like, that is sort of the key thing. And this is getting us into the history because, you know, open world games as opposed to on rails games. This was the era when that's transitioning. So let me crack open the dossier and let me, let's get into the history. So GoldenEye, 007 was developed by Rare, which was a British video game developer who had actually serious pedigree.

The founders were Tim and Chris Stamper. they started making games as far back as 1983. They made a game called Jetpack, which sold 300,000 copies for the ZX Spectrum Home Computer, which was huge numbers for 1983 and for a computer that was largely British in terms of the market. They pioneered using isometric graphics with a game called Edge, and they sell that company and then start a new one, which is called Rare. and they start developing for the system that became the Nintendo Entertainment System, the NES. John, I'm going to give this a try and we'll see how far we go with it, but I gave you a list of rabbit hole facts that I found while researching. And so hit me with rabbit hole number one.

Rare was Nintendo's first ever Western third-party developer. Which seems crazy to me. Well, but apparently it was very rare, if you'll forgive the pun. at this point for Nintendo to work with Western developers. They did a game called Slalom in 1986, which I have a vague memory of, but if you're saying that maybe you weren't into NES so much, it sounds like you might not remember that one. But between 1986 and 1991, Rare does 60 games for the NES and Game Boy. In 1991, they did a game called Battletoads. Does that ring any bells for you?

No. They are also doing, this might ring a bell for the S&S. They do Donkey Kong country. Okay. I do remember that one. Which was the biggest seller of the S&S generation. Some people in the research said that that might have single-handedly been responsible for fighting off the threat of Sega. Because Sega has, obviously the little blue guy at the time, which is faster and sort of

you know, faster than Mario jumping sort of leisurely around. And Donkey Kong Country was sort of a reaction to that a bit. Because of the success of Donkey Kong Country, Nintendo eventually acquires a 49% stake in Rare. In the early 90s, Rare has access to the same machines as they used to make the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, which are those silicon graphics machines, which always comes up weirdly in all of the history that I do, like the Mosaic Web Browser was made on those things. They were kicking around for so many important technological advancements in the early 90s. And they have access to the largest set of super, sorry, Silicon Graphics computers in Britain at the time.

So they were early pioneers in graphics, and Silicon Graphics machines are known for their graphics. So they're wanting to push the envelope. And hit me with Rabbit Hole number three. In 1995, Nintendo acquired the rights to Bond 17, which became GoldenEye, but Rare wasn't sure they wanted to produce the title. Can you guess why they tried to beg off this one? No, I kind of can't.

Maybe because they thought they couldn't do it justice on the hardware? Number one, video games based off of movies had a terrible reputation, which to a certain degree, they still do. From a developer's perspective, it's hard to... Right? Right. That's true. That's true. Which, maybe we should ask that about this game.

versus the movie. But from a developer perspective, they don't like video or movie-based video games because as the movie is being made, often the studio won't share very much with you about the plot. So you have to sort of develop with a vague idea. You're kind of running blind. Also, at this time, first-person shooters, which is what the game was designed to be, were thought of as PC games, not console games. And so on the one hand, they were intrigued by that because they wanted to push the envelope, but on the other hand, no one was entirely sure.

Think about when you were playing Doom or Quake or whatever. As a desktop game, you're playing with keyboard and mouse together, right? Right. And so no one knows if these first-person shooters can actually work well enough on a console. We'll get back to how it turns out that Nintendo. I still see that even to this day, right? I mean, my son, I mean, I don't, I'm not a gamer anymore, but my son is a college aide son.

And, you know, there's this whole, I mean, the whole side note, but there's a mini controversy over like a new keyboard with, you know, sub level response. You know, he's cheating, you know, I get it. And for me, the, the computer of my 90s was still. the Macs. So I was a marathon guy, you know, which was the Mac's version of Wake and Doom and stuff like that. But yeah, I totally get it. You know, you want that precision and the straight, you know, there's just, it didn't seem like something a console controller could do with the precision that you needed. Well, because we don't have the analog sticks until this generation of consoles, but I'll come back to that in a second. The third reason they are, uh,

maybe not so hot on this is Bond is sort of in the doldrums at this point, and this is maybe where you have more knowledge of this sort of stuff than I do. So, Gold Knight is the first Pierce-Brasnan Bond film, but it had been a while, right, because the last Timothy Dalton was maybe 88 or 89. So there's a good, like, half a decade, and so maybe they're afraid that the shine has kind of worn off Bond a bit. just real quick, are you a fan of the Peers-Brasnan Bond at all? There's, it's almost, there's so many debate you can have about the Bond movies,

but one that most fans of the movies, the franchise agree on, is that for the most part, you could argue that each of the actors who's played Bond's best movie was the first one. Now, the one that I think people would most likely disagree with that would be Sean Connery, where most people don't think Dr. No is the best one because they were sort of working out some of the, you know, elements of the franchise. But there are, you know, there is something to be said for that. And for Pierce Brosnan, I don't think there's any doubt that Golden Eye was his best movie. And I think he was terrific in the role. I think he, you know, the whole backstory.

where he got sucked into an extra year of Remington Steel on NBC, which was sort of a network rip-off of James Bond. Of James Bond. And would have been in the Timothy Dalton movies. I think he was great in the role, but after Golden Eye, the movies just got ever more preposterous. You know, they're invisible cars, hotels made out of ice. I don't know

somehow the franchise lost its way and needed the big reset to go back to sort of not realism but grittiness you know so I just I love him as Bond but most of his movies are so

like embarrassing it's in it's almost a shame my it's almost now too late and I don't think they would ever do it but my secret wish was like after the Craig era ended, rather than give the role to a new young actor, wouldn't it have been cool to do just, and say one time, one time only, we're bringing back Pierce Brosnan to do something like the Never Say Never Again.

He's old. He's on the verge of retirement. Here's one last, here's Bond as an old guy, you know. So I love Pierce Brosnan and the role, but Golden Eye is really the only good movie. Well, you've just described possibly why rare they take the project, but they're kind of skeptical about it because, you know, maybe they just have the James Bond's of their youths. They feel like the shines off the series or whatever. Sort of because of that, apparently, even though they take the project, they farm it out to the kids, if you will. They give it to about a dozen low-level programmers, many of whom had never worked on a game before. The game is supposed to come out Christmas of 1995 to coincide with the movie coming out. It would not. We will get to that.

The game took two and a half years to develop. The reason, one of the many reasons that it took so long to develop is in those days, they had to build the game engine from scratch. I'm not saying there's no Unity, no Unreal Engine, you know, don't at me. I'm sure there were early iterations of that. But in these days, fully a third of the development time, for a game like this, because again, these sorts of not on-rails open-world games are kind of fresh and new. You have to do it all from scratch. There's no off-the-shelf stuff components that they can pull in.

Also, as they start the work developing, the N64 isn't out yet, so they can't develop for the hardware. To the degree that the developers didn't even know what the controller would be like. So they used, John, your Sega Saturn controller to develop the game. And we'll come back to how important the analog stick for the N64 controller was. But I want to reiterate they're flying blind because they don't have access to the hardware. They don't necessarily have access to the plot. But what they were granted was a great deal of access to the set. They take tours of the set while the film is being filmed, take pictures, sketches.

So they're kind of getting more access than they thought they would, as opposed to being held at arm's length. And that helped them design the game to have fidelity to the setting of the movie. They're doing a thing where they actually had real architects come in and design the levels, which is sort of the reverse of how you usually do it. Like you would create a level with the objectives first and then do the architecture later. They were doing the architecture first and coming back and doing the objectives after that. The game that they're using for their inspiration is Virtua Cop. Do you remember that one?

That was an arcade game that used a light gun like duck hunt? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was ever a fan of those light gun games. but I spent way too much time in coin-op arcade, so I remember it. If you, and on the YouTube, you'll be able to see this. I'll put it on the screen. If you look at Virtual Cop was texture-mapped polygon. So if you look at some of the characters in Virtual Cop and compare them to

Golden Eye people, you're like, oh, yeah, this is, they're copying that, or this is the generation of that sort of thing. But Virtual Cop is a game on Rails. You can only go where the game wants you to go. and they want to do fully 3D, not open world necessarily, but 3D so that you can move around the room in whatever direction you want. That also leads to a lot of the developmental delays because, again, they're doing things that they shouldn't do because a lot of them had never done games before, so they're doing things that they don't know. They shouldn't. That anti-game approach was what I mentioned in terms of doing the levels first and then creating the mission.

second, that was their term for it, is anti-game. But that leads to a key innovation, which was a lot of these first-person shooters at the time, like Quake and Doom and things like that, were just basically kill everything. Go into a level and kill everything. And they wanted to do something that was not just kill everything, but like, get past, sneak past characters. or I want you to go into a room and get this thing and get out without dying. You don't necessarily have to kill everything, but you have an objective.

Some of the innovations that they also come up with were the NPCs, the bad guys. They're much more realistic. For example, I don't know, again, how your memory holds up on this, but when you would shoot like a soldier in the leg, they would bend over and hold their leg. or they would also notice things. Like, if you start shooting a guard at one end of the room, the guard around the corner will notice and come after you. And that was, again, I don't know that they were the first to do this,

but they were trying to bring all of these things into it, sort of that smartness. In the very first level, bunker, and this is in the not multiplayer version, when Bond enters the room, so the very first shooting that you have to do, there are two guards. One runs for an alarm while the other one starts attacking you the player, and so right away you have to make a decision. Who do you shoot first? The guard who will trip the

alarm and give you away or the guy coming right at you. And number one, I want to say that they deserve credit for, obviously technology is allowing the game to be smarter than this, but the fact that the NPCs are not on rails, they have a degree of intelligence. They were able to sneak into the game. Yeah, they weren't smart, but they were smarter than the NPCs in any game. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

The second thing that a lot of historians give them credit for is the idea of stealth in first-person shooters, creeping up to do things to, if you can kill a guard quickly and quietly, then the whole room doesn't react. Or if you can sneak through and get. the objective, you might not have to kill anybody. And so, again, sort of more dimensions and sophistication to a first-person shooter beyond just shooting and blowing stuff up. I'm going to tell you something that's going to blow your mind.

You were almost able to play as the Sean Connery Bond in the game. Because they got the rights to use the faces. of all the actors from the movie, and then they just went ahead and created characters from all of the bond stuff because technically they had the rights to it. So they actually rendered Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Timothy Dalton, but then they realized that it would cost like a million bucks apiece to secure the rights for each of those actors' licenses. Apparently those bonds are still in the ROM, and some mods, I think, unlock it, I believe, So, by the way, John, if you can find the mods, you could have Sean Connery go against

Roger Moore if you really, really wanted. One of the technical issues of this being so long ago is all of the characters are 42 pixels high by 24 pixels wide. So the faces can only use 40 triangles total. And so, again, it might look really old and timey if you look at the pictures of the characters now, but they did pretty good considering the the constraints that they were working under graphically. Yeah. And there was the whole thing with the cartridge versus a disk for storage, where

the cartridges that Nintendo 64 used had far less space available than compact discs that PlayStation used. All right. You jumped ahead. Where is this in my notes? When we get there, I'll say it. Oh, sorry. No, no worries. I'll just. I'll give you one. Give me rabbit hole number six. This is not about the cartridge, but about the rumble pack. It says that, I'm presuming rare, originally wanted to use the rumble pack to physically reload weapons. Because you could take the rumble pack in and out, and so, like, you would slam it into place with the palm of your hand.

That was a flourish too far, apparently. they did, again, do a lot of stuff because they didn't know they couldn't. They were using early sort of motion capture stuff. They did it all themselves. They jerry-rigged like ropes. So they get in like sort of motion capture suits. And then, all right, we need to capture what it looks like for an explosion to go off and a body to fly through the air. So they literally tie ropes around each other and pull each other off their feet.

They were getting a lot of inspiration from Doom, obviously, with the multiple weapon types, different ammo for different guns, different shooting rate for different guns. This is where the analog stick does come in, by the way, because when they got their hands on the actual N64 hardware and they see the analog stick, they figure out a way to move the gun around on the screen without having to move the character's body. I don't know if you remember this, but in Doom, like, you could never really look up. Right. It was sort of 2D. You know, it was a 3D looking game, but you really only operated on a flat plane. It was 3D in movement, but not 3D in terms of, like, yeah, stopping and looking all around 360 degrees.

With the analog stick, they figured out a way to do that, and this is what convinces them to move it from an on-rails game to basically a fully 3D, almost open world game. You know, now we have the dual analog sticks, but I would argue that they're among the first to show, as we said, that first-person shooters could work quite well on consoles if, once you have the analog sticks. that also adds about a year to the development time, too. It would have been done much sooner if they had, you know, kept it sort of like the way Doom operated. By the way, what is James Bond, the movie James Bond, what's his gun of choice, John? I got it. Is it a Beretta? The Walter PPP. That's at a Walter PPPK and a Beretta is the one that, that's the one that, that's, the Walter PPPK replaces in one of the Connery movies where he's the the guy comes the proto proto Q comes in and and says that it calls the barretta a lady's gun that's it in in in golden eye

007 it's named the pp7 because they couldn't license the gun brands uh do you remember the the sniper rifle in in the game like that's part of the stealth aspect of it the fact that you zoom in and shoot. They were not the first to do that. It was a game called MDK, which in my research, that was a Mac game, I was told. Do you remember MDK at all? No, I do not. All right, well, we'll look that up later.

Also, one more thing on this. If you remember, everything explodes in the game, tables. Like, if you shoot a table, it explodes in a fireball. They had a sort of four principles in the game. Is it fun? Is it funny? Is it consistent in the world of the game? And is it fair?

I think it's underrated how funny the game is. You know, and I think games like Fortnite have held on to that. But then there's other first-person shooters now that are just deathly serious. And I like that they had comedy, essentially. Yeah. Or humor in the game. And it was. I think they pulled that off with aplomb because it was funny enough that it definitely made me enjoy the game more, but it didn't feel, you know, they didn't take it to Austin Powers' parody land.

Right. You know, it still felt like, it felt like James Bond. It felt like you were in the world of James Bond. And, you know, maybe that kind of went away with the, you know, certainly after Golden Eye, the game, but with the Daniel Craig. movies. Some of the humor, you know, but there's some funny scenes, even in his, right? But certainly in the Roger Moore era, there were, you know, definitely gags. Well, tons of raised eyebrow humor, essentially, and double entendre. Right. That was always part of it. Yeah. And they kept the best gag from the movie where when Bond, from the opening of the movie,

and I think it's the opening overall set piece in the game, where you're in the North Korean base or whatever, whatever country, Russia, whatever it is, and you're in the shaft over the bathroom and you look down and there's a bad guy sitting on the toilet and you, you know, it was in the movie. They put it in the game. And it, you know, it's funny. It's funny to shoot a guy when he's sitting on a toilet. Definitely. As even Jurassic Park knows, you know, have the T-Rex grab somebody on the toilet. That's good for a laugh and a jump scare too. The movie that actually was their big inspiration, and this makes sense given the year it came out, was Michael Mann's Heat, which came out in 1995 as well, and has that famous gun battle in downtown L.A. Obviously, it was not quite as bloody and intense as that, but that leads me to this point, which is that Nintendo kept asking them to dial back the gore. Originally, it was a lot more bloody. You would leave a room and the walls would be covered in blood. I found a book about the game called Golden I-O-7 by Elise Nour, and this is a quote from one of the developers from that book.

The team received a fax from Nintendo asking them to take out the knives, because originally you'd use a knife as part of the stealth, like come up and slit somebody's throat. Arguing that a knife felt more offensive than a gun because it meant too much murder in the close distance. explanation that tickled the team. We just loved that phrase, Doak told me laughing. It became a phrase we would use, murder in the far distances. Great. Knock yourself out all day long, but not murder in the close distance. Isn't that true? I mean, to my knowledge, best of my knowledge, I can tell you, Brian, I've never killed anybody. But if I had, if I had to, it would definitely, I would definitely rather do it with a gun than with a knife. I mean, that just, you know, I mean, the closest I come to hurting somebody with a knife is

cutting up my steak or something. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to do the butchering. It's, you know, it's, and, you know, again, not to bring this podcast into serious political territory, but, I mean, I, you know, I think if you, countries with less lower rates of gun, ownership have lower rates of murder because it's, you know, kind of people are less willing to kill other people if they have to actually, you know, stick a knife and so. It is more gruesome. But it also is more stealthy, right? Right. Which is, which would lead to it being like a more

interesting sort of game. By the way, the compromise that they, the reason that there are throwing knives in the game is because of that. Okay, you don't want us to come up and stab a guy right in the face. Okay, throwing knives. So death by at distance. It's interesting, Nintendo is squeaky, clean, even more so in these days than now. I'm going to make the argument later that this is the game that taught them they could be a little more adult, maybe. But the tension here is Mario on one side and James Bond, a guy with a literal license to kill on the other. So actually hit me up with Rabbit whole number eight.

Shigura, Shiguru, Miyamoto, I just know him as Miyamoto, himself was faxing the team saying it was a, quote, murder simulator, and there was too much, quote, point blank killing. He wants them to tone it down.

Some of his suggestions are make the blood different colors, maybe green or blue. He suggested a cut scene at the end of the game where you're in the hospital and you shake hands with all of the other recovering bad guys to show that nobody really died. There is an ending credit sequence where they have a sort of cast list of characters,

so it sort of gives you the impression you've been playing out a movie. Like, this wasn't real death and destruction. But there was obvious tension where, you know, Nintendo, as you were saying, you were a Sega person because you thought Nintendo was a little too childish or safe, maybe. Well, no, I was a Sega person just because I got into it, you know, other kids in the door. But then I did sort of think that, you know, and the game I was most into John Madden football was available on both, but clearly to me was better on Genesis. And then, though, that was in our minds when we were thinking Sony or Nintendo 64, and it's like, is this going to be

just for kids? And it really, the library. really wound up being very, very PG and G rated. I mean, it just was. I mean, and you can see it. I mean, it is, you know, to this day, Nintendo, I mean, it's to their credit. I complained about it at the time, like sitting there at Blockbuster, looking at these awesome, cool, realistic games for the PlayStation that weren't, had no peer on Nintendo. But it's obviously been to Nintendo's credit as a company to stick to their guns on that

Disney level of family friendliness as a core primary aspect of the brand. And Golden Eye was a radical exception. I mean, it's to, it was, but even if it wasn't a good game, it would be memorable as being so different in tone. You know, I mean, it was definitely R-rated. I mean, I don't even know if video games had ratings back then. But, you know, they think they came out with Mortal Kombat. Yeah. Yeah, the blood was red and you killed a lot of people. I found the part, the entire Golden Eye cartridge is 12 megabytes. If you have a 128 gigabyte iPhone right now, you could fit 10,000 Golden Eyes on it.

Okay, to start to bring this to the launch, the Golden Eye movie came out in November 1995 1995. Eventually, we're into the fall of 97 and the game still isn't done yet. And so in various parts of the research, there's disagreement about how this happened, when this happened, but Nintendo repeatedly tries to shut development down, which why not? Why release a game based on a movie two years after the movie has come out? Tomorrow never dies. The next Brazen movie is coming out at this point. So for three months, Nintendo apparently stopped funding development entirely and Rare kept paying the team out of its own pocket without telling anybody about that. Also, one of Nintendo's problems was first-person shooters weren't popular in Japan, so there's,

again, the cultural tension that we're talking about. But first-person shooters are becoming big in the U.S. So one of the arguments people have made historically is that Nintendo went ahead with the game sort of as a strategic play to see if the game, this is the one that could break through for them in terms of first-person shooters. Okay, John, we've gotten this far, and we've not even talked about the big thing that a lot of people remember Golden I Four, which is the multiplayer game, rabbit hole number 10. Multiplayer almost didn't happen. I knew this.

Somehow I knew this fact, but... Well, Nintendo's trying to shut it down, and so obviously the impetus is to try to get it out the door as soon as humanly possible. But at the same time, it's the spring of 97, and the team is playing a lot of Mario Kart 64, which takes advantage of the four controller ports on the N64. They're also playing Super Bomberman, which had multiplayer as well, and used bombs as weapons, which they found hilarious. And so one of the developers named Steve Ellis was apparently the last addition to the development team, and he's six months out of college. He really wants to do multiplayer.

He's told absolutely no way the game is already too far behind schedule, but he codes up the multiplayer in six weeks, which was incredibly difficult to do because line by line, he had to go in the code and introduce the concept of the player. into the code, as opposed to just you're a portal looking into the world. Now you have to know where the player is in the world, their position, their direction, their health, their ammo. You also have to render the other players visible to other players, right, which is taxing on the machine. You have to do the four possible split-screen windows. Everyone has to be represented.

For example, the fact that you shoot over Odd Jobs' head, that wasn't a problem necessarily in the story version of the game. So, you know, they discover that that's a problem in multiplayer because they hadn't planned for multiplayer. By the way, for the record, according to the book, the developers say that if you play as odd job, that is sort of cheating. I kind of agree. Yes.

The thing that they didn't have time to work out, another thing they didn't have time to work out was something that led to the slapers-only mode. The idea was they wanted Bond to do karate chops because all the way going back to Conry, right? He does karate a lot. Yeah, I guess. Okay. You know. But they didn't have the time to get the motion capture right and it just ended up looking like you were slapping people.

By the way, I learned in the research that a slapper is British slang for a promiscuous woman. So they find this hilarious. They decide that they're going to have a most. called Slappers Only. And they keep the slapper in as opposed to having a karate chop because they find the pun and they find the whole idea of just running around slapping people. Meanwhile, after, then at the end of the day, they go to the gentleman's club named Slappers Only. Right, probably. So they have multiplayer up and running quick and dirty, but they don't have the sign-off to include it.

And their point person at Nintendo is a guy by the name of Ken Lob, best known as the co-creator of the Killer Instinct series. I believe he is still at Xbox these days. I don't know if that name rings a bell to you at all. No, it does not. Lob comes to Britain to check in on what he believes are the finishing touches of development. The team sits him down and shows a multiplayer and he's blown away. The team says, we want another six months to implement this. And Lobb says, you want what? Because they're so late at this point.

but he's quoted as saying about his demo of the multiplayer, it's one of those moments in time that's literally photographically burned into my memory. This is too fun, he says, let's add it in. Rabbit hole number 10. No, we already did that one. That was multi-paired. Oh, okay. You want 11, I think.

11, yes. Yes, the gun, which was one of the guns you could choose was the clob, K-L-O-B, and it's named after Ken Lobb. Like maybe that was his email address, K Lobb. Right, right, right. So he's immortalized in the game for that. Can you imagine now, I mean, obviously we wouldn't be talking about it, but can you imagine this game without multiplayer?

Like, I feel like the story was good, but it was, as we said, the multiplayer that kept us playing. Yeah, because that was where we got the most replay for sure. I my roommate and I just it wasn't just that we were thirsty for good games for Nintendo 64 although we were but we just recognized the more we got into it that this was truly it was just a great game but we also thought man what a bargain because we would have paid for two separate cartridges you know one to play the single player and an entirely separate $60 purchase just to get the multiplayer game like both games both ways of playing, even though they were very different, were both fantastic. And the fact that you got them both on the same cartridge was amazing. It also make the argument that think of how long has GTA5 been out now, right? Like over a decade. And the replayability of that is, you know, now you can release new levels and new expansion packs and things like that. But

it is, it sort of maybe is the first time that the video game industry learns that if you have a good enough multiplayer or a rich enough multiplayer, the game itself and the graphics themselves can age out, but the gameplay might never. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and think about it. At a certain intuitive level, and especially maybe for somebody who's used to playing first person games today where you play against opponents, on a network, or even going back to the land party days where everybody would have their own machine and their own display, it seems like a problem that your, your opponents in the multiplayer, you can see exactly what they're looking at because you're sharing the TV, right? But that's just part of the game, right? It just becomes an element of the gameplay. You know, I mean, you, you know, there's all sorts of games, you know, like you play card games and you're supposed to to keep your card secret. But you play chess, you can certainly, or checkers, you see every,

you know, piece your opponent has. It's counterintuitive, and then once you get used to it, it became part of the fun, where you'd kind of see, oh, I know where you are, because there's no other part of the level that looks like that. And then there were other parts of the levels that were so repetitive, where you could glance over to the other side of the screen and see what they were looking at, but you're like, I have no idea where he is. He could be right behind me because it looks like I'm in the same room. But I don't know. It could be in that other one that's on the other side of the building. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Yes. So that's how Brian was able to play the chess match of laying proximity minds for you so that I would completely box you in and you'd definitely lose. So Gold9-O-7 debuts at E3, 1997. It doesn't exactly make big waves. Banjo Kizui got all the attention that year. It is released in August of 1997. and is also not an immediate hit. But Ken Lobb, Klob again, has an idea. And this is bringing back Blockbuster video. He sent copies of GoldenEye to every Blockbuster in North America,

said they could send the game back in 60 days, no questions asked if it didn't rent. And apparently, no Blockbuster ever sent them back, because GoldenEye was apparently the most rented game for like three years running. And this pays off because by the... the holiday season of 1997, the game is in high demand because John and Brian had gone to rent it at Blockbuster and loved it. But since Nintendo hadn't planned on a game for a two-year-old movie being a hit, they hadn't made enough cartridges. Word of mouth is continuing to grow.

And by the holiday season of 1998, when eventually they have caught up with demand, the game has sold 2.1 million copies, the rare game to sell more games. in its second year than its first. By the 1999 holiday season, it sold more copies that year than the previous two years combined. It would go on to sell over 8 million copies, was the third best-selling game on the N64 platform after Mario Kart 64 and Super Mario 64. So it's the best-selling game, not with Mario in the title. And I'm going to do this here. I would make the argument in other people have made this argument that Golden Ice saved the N-64. And here's my case.

As we discussed, the wrap on Nintendo when the N-64 launches is it might have been decent hardware, but one of the things early on, do you remember this? It didn't have a lot of games. It only launched with Super Mario 64 and Pilot Wings, 64. Yeah, it didn't have a large library of games, and the games were not, the ones that were out did not have a lot of variety or adult-oriented things. themes. And 95 into 97, the PlayStation is dominant, had all the games, had the more grown-up games, as we're saying. But, and to prove this out, Nintendo only sold 33 million N64's

lifetime compared to the 124.9 million PlayStation sold. But one in four N64 owners ended up owning GoldenEye. That's crazy. How many people do you think ended up owning a Nintendo 64 just to play Goldenite. Tons. I bet there's tons of N64 still in operation for that reason. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure, especially with multiplayer, right, where if I came over to your house and I was at a PlayStation,

but you've got this game and it's great. It is fun to play together. And you can pick it up pretty quickly and you'd be like, oh, I have to get this. Finally, the thing that unfortunately, Gold 9-07 is famous for is the rights issues. There's been many attempts to bring the game back in various iterations and redo the graphics and all that stuff. But apparently it's tied up with the rights of the studios and Rare gave up the rights at some point or doesn't want to do it.

They ended up doing a different game that people considered to be the true sort of descendant of Golden I-O-7. Let me ask you this. I mean, it's maybe a moot point, but like if the next year when the new version of Nintendo comes out, the new Switch 2 or whatever, if they did a fully remastered one where everything was the same. Like, this is, if you're going to do it, I think like we were saying, the gameplay was so perfect. Okay, upscale the graphics, but make every level the same, every weapon the same. do you think that that's the way to do it, or is that a fool's errand where it's like, hey, look, it was a masterpiece of its time.

You can't really bring the magic back. Yeah, I suspect that it would be a fool's errand. I think because it was in the same way that you wouldn't want them to remake Goldfinger. Don't just remake Goldfinger and make it a new Austin Martin and a new actor and shoot it in 4K. In a weird way, you know, the movies are, the best Bond movies are very much of the decade they come from. And I think that's true of the game, too.

That's what I think. I would say, and I think it would be more true to the franchise of, well, let's move it forward, right? Let's move, you know, just the same way that the Bond movies move forward with better and, or more, modern takes on the character and the plot, do the same thing with the game, make a new one, and try to do for today's capabilities what Golden Eye was to the mid-90s technical capabilities. I feel like the real gameheads, they believe that you should play the classic games on the hardware that it was created for, and that's the true experience. And anything else is just sort of a nostalgia money grab.

Okay, John, I want to get you out of here. John Gruber, is there anything you'd like to plug, any of your various podcasts, any project coming up that you'd like people to know about? Nah, just come read my stuff at Daring Fireball. That's good enough. There you. Thank you for listening to another episode of Rad History. Remember, if you're watching on YouTube, like and subscribe. If you're listening on a podcast, know that there are YouTube versions as well.

So you can see some of the things we've been talking about, but also rate and review us on Apple Podcasts on Spotify. and tell your friends to search either place for rad history. Next week, if our schedule holds, we're going to be doing Calvin and Hobbs. So listen for that. And until then, yo, Holmes, smell you later.