Excerpt: How the designers of GoldenEye 007 made use of “Anti-Game Design”

In this excerpt from her upcoming book, writer and historian Alyse Knorr talks about some of the design decisions that made Goldeneye 007 stand out from other '90s first-person shooters, and why that design endures to this day. The book is currently looking for backers on Kickstarter.

When [game designer David] Doak first joined the team at the end of 1995, GoldenEye’s levels were just barebones architecture—no objectives, enemies, or plot. After designing the watch menu, he and [game designer Duncan] Botwood started creating a single-player campaign that followed and expanded upon GoldenEye the movie’s narrative—a difficult task, considering the fact that the film’s dialogue about Lienz Cossack traitors and Kyrgyz missile tests went over the heads of quite a few 12-year-olds. Doak and Botwood’s job was to tell this complicated story using rudimentary pre- and post-mission cutscenes, pre-mission briefing paperwork, in-game conversations with NPCs, and mission objectives, which proved the most powerful way to allow players to experience the story themselves.

The biggest inspiration for GoldenEye’s objective design was not another first-person shooter but rather Super Mario 64. “I studiously tried to learn what Nintendo was,” [game designer Martin] Hollis said in 2015 of his years at Rare. “I played Link to the Past from beginning to end—I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Then [an early version of] Mario 64 came out during the development of GoldenEye, and we were clearly influenced by that game. Ours was much more open as a result.” Hollis took from Super Mario 64 the idea of including multiple mission objectives within one level. For instance, in the Control level, the player must protect Natalya, disable the GoldenEye satellite, and destroy some armored mainframes.