Goldeneye on the N64 was a huge watershed moment for console gamers. Personally I spent an insane amount of time chasing my brother through Facility, sticky bombing every wall I could find, camping with the golden gun on Temple…
And the interesting thing: just about every N64 owner has similar stories.
Goldeneye really struck a nerve among gamers my age, which is why I think this Australian documentary has the potential to be something pretty special.
It’s called GoldenEra and it’s a project on Indiegogo. Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the documentary. My beautiful face is in the trailer above.
Behind the camera is veteran Australian games journo Narayan Pattison — who gave me my first job in games writing — and experienced Director Drew Roller. The guys have already interviewed a large number of developers involved in making Goldeneye and it sounds like there’s a real story to be told there.
Looking forward to seeing more. You can find out more about the project here
Comments
9 responses to “An Australian Documentary About The Making Of Goldeneye”
Well isn’t this lovely. They even got the James Bond of Games Journalism in Edmond Tran to appear. Good luck to all involved.
Narayan’s a legend. The crisp footage of a N64 game here reminds me how I always wondered how they achieved the same crisp clear hi-res screenshots for N64 games in N64 Gamer. There was this one pic of Link in Kokiri Forest, I swear I spent months trying to get my N64 and old TV to out-put the same sort of visuals.
This isn’t a thing I expect anybody to remember, or consider for the production itself, but in the 90s, there was a television commercial featuring N64 games. Not exactly weird in itself.
Goldeneye was involved, but its footage was pixellated and the announcer’s mention of ‘Goldeneye’ was beeped out.
I swear this is true.
I always thought it had something to do with featuring a mature rated game in amongst an ad full of G or PG rated games, the ad itself probably shown during family programming hours as well.
I remember that ad. Pretty sure it was to ad to the ‘spy’ element of the game. It was all a bit secret and not just for ‘anyone’ who might be watching etc. Clever marketing.
I can remember not long after the game was released there was a company that took the rocket launcher sound and used it in their advertising campaign as a transition effect. Used to make me laugh and I always wondered if rare could have come after them for copyright.
The running gag of how much Narayan Pattison was obsessed with Goldeneye is one of my stronger memories of reading through N64 Gamer as a kid.
Goldeneye, along with Silent Hill, are two my favorite development stories, as they were both born from teams that the developer didn’t have the highest hopes for and managed to do something completely different to what was currently available. Should be a really good watch.
I think a lot of the team were new to video games and this was their first big one. Kind of worked out well as they were super ambitious and managed to mostly pull it off.
One guy spend a weekend and got multiplayer up and running etc. Lots of cool stories, this will be great to watch.
There is also a 1 hour or so video from many years ago from something like GDC where a bunch of the devs talking about development.
Goldeneye is the best game of all time.
Ever.
EVER.
Drop mic.
End of discussion.
No correspondence will be entered into.
I wish them luck.
I’d love to see Noclip take this one on though.
If I ever get a digital watch the first thing I do will be installing a Goldeneye 007 watch face.