GoldenEye 007’s Best Feature Wasn’t Supposed to Exist

Every N64 owner from the era has the same GoldenEye 007 multiplayer memory: four controllers, a CRT split into quarters, and one house rule everyone had, no Oddjob, because his hitbox made him unfair and everyone knew it. It’s the reason a lot of us still own a working N64 in the first place. And none of it was supposed to happen.

GoldenEye 007 Started as a 2D Side-Scroller

GoldenEye 007 didn’t start as a shooter. Nintendo originally announced it for the Super Nintendo as a 2D side-scroller, roughly in the mold of Donkey Kong Country, which Rare was also making at the time. Director Martin Hollis pushed to turn it into a 3D first-person game for the Nintendo 64 instead. The hardware wasn’t even finished yet. Super Mario 64 played a real role in that decision too. Seeing what Nintendo’s own 3D platformer could do on the system convinced Hollis the free-roaming, open-level approach was worth chasing over a rails-style shooter closer to Virtua Cop, which is what the game looked like in its earliest trailer.

That’s already a bigger swing than most licensed movie tie-in games ever attempt. Most Bond games before and after this one played it safe. This one didn’t, and it happened almost by accident.

Nine People, Most of Whom Had Never Shipped a Game

The team behind all of this was tiny. Nine people: Martin Hollis directing, Karl Hilton, David Doak, Mark Edmonds, B. Jones, Steve Ellis, Graeme Norgate, Grant Kirkhope, and Duncan Bottwood. Most of them had never shipped a game before, and development dragged on for over three years, long enough that Rare’s own founders had to remind the team this wasn’t a university project anymore.

If Grant Kirkhope’s name looks familiar, it should. He scored the music for GoldenEye alongside composer Graeme Norgate, and he’s also the composer behind Donkey Kong 64, covered in an earlier video on the YouTube channel.

GoldenEye 007 Multiplayer: The Mode Nobody Approved

Here’s the part that actually justifies the headline. The original design didn’t include GoldenEye 007 multiplayer, the split-screen mode fans remember above everything else. According to Steve Ellis and Martin Hollis, there was essentially no multiplayer mode until around March or April of 1997. The game shipped in August.

Ellis built it, largely on his own, in secret, without Rare or Nintendo management knowing it was happening. In his own words: “It really was put in at the last minute, something you wouldn’t dream of doing these days, and it was done without the knowledge or permission of the management at Rare and Nintendo. The first they knew about it was when we showed it to them working.”

Read that again. This mode turned into a cultural fixture. Half the shooters that followed it copied the idea. It existed for months as something one programmer was quietly building without anyone’s approval. If Ellis had asked first and gotten told no, which was a real possibility given the timeline, none of the rest of this happens.

Nintendo also required Rare to tone down the violence before release. Beta box art and early screenshots show blood impact effects that never made the final cut. Nintendo did this to a lot of 90s games, filing off the edges before putting its name on them.

A Legal Mess That Kept It Locked Away for Decades

This is the part most people don’t know, and it’s a genuinely frustrating story if you were the kind of person hoping to just buy this game again on a modern console.

Three different parties split the rights to GoldenEye 007: Nintendo, MGM and Danjaq (who control the James Bond film rights), and, after Rare’s 2002 sale, Microsoft. Getting all three to agree on anything turned rereleasing the game into a legal nightmare that dragged on for years.

It nearly happened once. Rare developed a remaster for Xbox Live Arcade, internally codenamed Project Bean, through 2007 and 2008. It reportedly needed only about two more months of work to finish. Nintendo, MGM, and Microsoft, which had owned Rare since 2002, couldn’t reach a licensing agreement. They shelved the project anyway. Pieces of that cancelled build leaked online starting in December 2020. By February 2021, a full playable version, dated back to August 2007, was circulating publicly. That was years after Microsoft had quietly buried the whole project.

An official rerelease didn’t happen until January 27, 2023, nearly 26 years after the original launch. Nintendo Switch got a version closest to the original, including online multiplayer. Xbox got a 4K remaster instead, capped at 30fps and limited to split-screen only, with no online play. Two different companies made two different versions. Both stayed bound by the same three-way rights split that kept this game locked in a vault for a quarter of a century.

The Best GoldenEye 007 Multiplayer Combo Was the Dumbest One

Before a match even starts, GoldenEye’s multiplayer lets you turn on extra rule sets on top of the normal deathmatch, and you can stack more than one at a time. My personal favorite combination was always License to Kill, which turns every single hit into a kill, stacked together with Slappers Only, which removes every weapon from the level entirely and leaves everyone just running around trying to slap each other to death with their bare hands. It sounds like a joke setting because it basically is one, and it never stops being funny.

Still the Reason We Remember Split Screen

None of the multiplayer shooters that followed on N64, or the ones that followed on every console after it, exist quite the same way without this game’s four-player mode accidentally proving there was an audience for it. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t approved, and it almost didn’t survive its own legal history to be rereleased at all. That’s a lot of almosts for something this many of us still consider one of the best games this console ever had.

If you’ve got a copy that still works and four working controllers, GoldenEye 007 multiplayer is still the correct way to play it. Everything else about how it got made is just a bonus story to tell while someone else is picking their level.