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Power Button - Episode 356: February 2023 Nintendo Direct Recap

GoldenEye 007 Quickies

Goldeneye 007 Box

As I said on our most recent podcast in which we tore into the re-release of GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo Switch and the Microsoft Xbox platform, replaying the classic Nintendo 64 game has sent me down the rabbit hole on all things GoldenEye.  I rewatched the movie, listened to the soundtrack, watched making-of videos both deep dive and high level, and much more, so I knew I had to put the best of these things together here to share. It's a collection of retrospective videos, re-orchestrated music, technical breakdowns, and alternate versions. Enjoy!

 

The first video above is a post-mortem of the game's development presented by Director Martin Hollis in which he spends an hour on a deep dive of the game's inception, initial planning, development, testing, and release. There's some fun stories in there including how the game was initially reported to be a Super NES title, how the game was too ambitious for its own good, its Virtua Cop origins, and a last-ditch attempt to fix a critical bug during lot check. The second is a short documentary produced but cut from the original release of the Rare Replay compilation, but was leaked online some time ago after GoldenEye was cut from that package. It's only appropriate that it lives on now that the game has been included after all these years.

Digital Foundry has put every version of GoldenEye to the test to find out which version performs best. No version is perfect, but some are better than others. The Microsoft Xbox platform version sports the best modernized controls, the Nintendo Switch version features the best performance, and the original Nintendo 64 version boasts the most authentic vision of the development team.

Fans have a tendency to get creative when left with too much time and talent on their hands. Here's a fan-made hack of GoldenEye that replaces James Bond and crew with characters from the Mushroom Kingdom. Super Mario is James Bond, Luigi is Alec Trevelyen, Princess Peach is Natalya Simonova, Bowser is Colonel Ourumov, and so on.

It's a shame we'll never get to officially play the GoldenEye remake for the Microsoft Xbox 360, but you can watch the entire leaked game play out in this video.

GoldenEye's soundtrack is remembered well even today, and this orchestrated version of the music shows why.

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