Goldeneye 64's inspirational startup story

Pretty cool to see so many fellow hackers with similar positive memories of this game. It's pretty indicative of the age group here on HN. For reference, I'm 23.<p>This was one of the greatest games ever made, no doubt. I've actually never been able to relate to a lot of my buddies who can game for hours on end. Starcraft, WoW, etc.. bore me after 30 minutes.<p>Goldeneye on the other hand ... I could have easily died from starvation without the parental supervision.<p>Anyhow, back to the original post. It's interesting to me that the original team had no idea what they were doing. I still look back on apps or things I built years ago, lacking absolutely any idea of what I was doing, and being amazed at how successful or great they ended up. Inversely, sometimes the product or thing I spent the most time agonizing over ended up being a total flop. More and more I am learning that you just gotta side with the majority of the 80/20, stick to your gut feelings, and jam jam jam to get that puppy out the door.<p>It's always tricky to find that perfect place between being a bootstrapped/scaffolded/barebones MVP product and a well-thought out, carefully designed product. I'm glad the Rare team managed to hit it with Goldeneye, they're an inspiration.

I've never been a big gamer. I have a short attention span and lose interest too quickly, but I loved Goldeneye 64. The N64 was my first games console (I got it soon after it came out, I think I was 7 at the time) and Goldeneye was the game that was bundled with it. In general there were some great N64 games. The were the obvious ones like Super Mario, Mission Impossible was another good one, but my favourite was Diddy Kong Racing. It was the only game I've ever got 'addicted' too. The N64's also one of the few pieces of tech I've held on to. Every now and then I hook it up and get another few weeks of fun out of it.

Power Weapons in the Stack. I owned the top floor.<p>Immediately prior to reading this, I was writing about how non-game developers can indeed bring a unique perspective to the table when developing games. This is definitely an inspirational story and helpful in reaffirming my thoughts. Thanks for sharing.

I enjoyed reading this until I reached the end: "I still have nightmares about playing Temple and not being able to find the proximity mines. If you like James Bond, lattes, startups and design, you'd enjoy my tweets."<p>Talk about a non sequitur.

Proximity Mines under the ammo spawns. Invisible room in facility, entrance in Temple. Race to choose oddjob.

Proximity mines on temple, that almost never happened. Thankfully that one developer stood for what's right and made our childhoods that much better.

This article seemed very familiar, and I found the original article where a lot of the quotes/text came from, 'The Making of Goldeneye' from may 2011 [1]<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_goldeneye.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_golden...</a>

For those interested in more development anecdotes, the game's director did a full postmortem at this year's GDC Europe: <a href="http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-GoldenEye.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-Gold...</a>

Alas, the article is a bit thin on the details.

Best game ever. So many fun times with my buddies playing the 4 screen multi-player, throwing proximity mines on every spawn spot in the Facility.

I really loved the menu screen showing you what levels you'd done and what difficulty level you'd done them on. Simple, efficient.<p>It took me weeks to realise that the cut-scene graphics were actually useful and not just fluff. They often provided hints and tips or let you know about enemies.<p>There's a bunch of stuff still in the rom code that isn't accessible from the game - the hidden island; some glitchy levels. And there's some bits left over from the "notorious" but removed "put your face in the game" mode. (Which used the GB camera to map face photos onto game models for multiplayer but got removed after a mass shooting.)<p>I loved the train; I loved the tunnel in the damn. I hated trying to keep the bloody hostages alive on the boat. The first few times I set the alarm off were scary.<p>This was an amazing game. The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why.

Temple in Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer game ever.<p>Tangential to OP's article, <a href="http://console.fm" rel="nofollow">http://console.fm</a> is awesome.

I'd be just as interested in how Rare went from doing Goldeneye 64 to making what seem to be relatively mediocre games today.

Anyone interested in putting together a game in SF?

It's been such a great game, I lost countless hours as well.<p>They redid the original Goldeneye for Wii and sadly I bought it. It's a horrible remake. Aiming with pointing using the Wii Remote is really hard and turning around takes ages, but this isn't the worst thing. They changed the multiplayer game mode: You can't pick up other weapons as you could in the 64 version - you have to chose in the beginning which weapons you'd like... I always loved this in the 64 version (proximity mines..oh yes :D)

I spent a ton of time playing this game as a kid. I remember the game being flawless as far as gameplay, and those were good times.<p>Point: Maybe more mainstream games should be created by inexperienced teams to compete with the 6-month Call of Duty plot change cycle (i.e. same shit different day).

That game was in the top 5 N64 games sold, routinely hitting the top spot for roughly 3 years [and perhaps a little change]. It was an incredible run, I remember following it in EGM.

It was still a bad idea to base your game on movie ip.