When GoldenEye 007 arrived on the Nintendo 64 in August 1997, it changed what a console first-person shooter could be. The deathmatch mode became a staple of living rooms worldwide. The single-player missions set a new bar for licensed games. And somewhere inside every cartridge ever sold, a fully functioning emulator for a different computer from a different decade was sitting quietly, waiting for nobody.

A Team That Had No Business Making This Game

The people who made GoldenEye 007 were, by most measures, not supposed to be able to pull it off. Nine of the eleven core developers had never shipped a professional game before. Martin Hollis, the director, had previously worked as a third programmer on Killer Instinct. Rare gave the team relative freedom, a Bond license, and then largely left them alone, sometimes for stretches of up to six months with no management visits.

Development started in January 1995, shortly after the GoldenEye film opened in cinemas. The game released in August 1997, more than two years later. A movie tie-in arriving two years after the film should have been dead on arrival by the conventions of the industry. It was not.