007 GoldenEye - New Book Excerpt on Design

[iacas]

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

---

Author Alyse Knorr shares a behind-the-scenes look at how the N64 classic was made.

Pretty interesting. Not a short read, but not overly long.

[saevel25]

Man, I played the crap out of that game. It is amazing how janky or broken some of those 64 games were. Watch a few videos of Ocarina of Time speed runs, where they glitch the heck out of the game. I am amazed that I didn't accidentally end up sliding across the map once. 

Quote

“There are rooms with no direct relevance to the level. There are multiple routes across the level. This is an anti-game design approach, frankly. It is inefficient because much of the level is unnecessary to the gameplay. But it contributes to a greater sense of freedom, and also realism. And in turn this sense of freedom and realism contributed enormously to the success of the game.”

This is true, but the game had a really good multiplayer experience. So, that so called waste of space, maybe turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the multiplayer experience. 

I think in some instances, you want inexperience because it can create a wider range of "What about this" versus a group of experience people who will go, "We know this works." Since this was early life cycle of 64, the open mindless of inexperience probably was the correct choice. 

Example, the team that did 007, made Perfect Dark. By all accounts Perfect Dark is the better game. Perfect Dark doesn't exists if that same team didn't get to explore game development on the 64 with 007. 

 

[iacas]

I played GoldenEye a lot, too. It was always great to sneak peeks at the other quadrants of the screen, particularly if you saw your character in one of them. They were some of the best nights I remember from college.

The overall best times in front of the N64, however… were spent playing Battle Mode in Mario Kart. We averaged an hour a day of it my entire sophomore year of college. It was almost always on, and sometimes battles of two players with one balloon each would last 30 minutes, with two other bombs running around.

Also…