'GoldenEye 007' N64 update: Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto wanted the ending less violent
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Game director Martin Hollis revealed during an interview in the GameCity festival that "GoldenEye 007" game would have been much more violently depicted if not for Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto.
"Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge. For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red," Hollis said, via the report by The Guardian.
The team who worked on the game received a faxed letter from Miyamoto with suggestions to tone down the violence of the game.
"One point was that there was too much close-up killing - he found it a bit too horrible. I don't think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital," Hollis explained.
Instead of going ahead with the suggestions, Hollis and his team created the credits to include a disclaimer that it "was artifice" and it "was not real killing."
Hollis also revealed that "GoldenEye 007" was more "open" and had had multiple objectives on different levels as it was inspired by "The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" due to him playing the game avidly.
Hollis was impressed with how Nintendo handled their refusal to make another game out of the next Bond movie at that time. Despite having the game making a lot of money, Nintendo just accepted Hollis' team's refusal.
"We had a small chat, three or four of us on the team. It was like, 'No'. We sent the message back, 'The answer is no. We don't plan to make another Bond game from another Bond film'. And that was it," he said.
CNET reports that instead of working on another Bond game, the developer studio made "Perfect Dark" instead which Hollis considers as the game's "spiritual sequel."