Miyamoto wanted to make GoldenEye more family-friendly

The conversation, transcribed by The Guardian, cites a number of curious episodes, but the suggestions put forward by Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of so many iconic first-party Nintendo titles, are simply delicious. The relentless slaughter of sentient mushrooms, oversized octopuses, and anything that gets in Samus Aran’s way, sure, but until Goldeneye 007, Wild Gunman was as close as Nintendo got to letting you inflict a few real damage on your fellow humans.

“I don’t think I did anything with that input”. Miyamoto also added it would be nice to add at the game’s end the opportunity to “shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital”.

1997’s GoldenEye 007 was a massive commercial and critical success for Nintendo, selling 8 million copies worldwide and generating an enormous amount of revenue. It’s a bit of a stretch to say whether these end credits really made a difference to how people viewed the game’s action, but it was apparently enough to appease Nintendo, as the game went on to sell more than 8 million copies, the third-best performing game ever released for the N64. However, it’s hard to make a squeaky-clean game based on James Bond, a womanizing secret agent who kills scores of people. There’s no splatter or dismemberment in the game.

“For a while we had a few gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out”, he said.

“Hollis” team appeased Miyamoto’s second point – except they didn’t do it his way. And for another GoldenEye nostalgia blast, watch Heroes Reborn’s Zachary Levi talk about his new NBC role while playing the Nintendo 64 classic. I played [Zelda] Link to the Past from beginning to end – I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Minamoto’s idea is silly, but it has one thing so many ultra-realistic games that would follow GoldenEye lack: perspective. “Ours was much more open as a result”.

While Rare did tone down the game’s bloodiness to a few extent – they weren’t completely giving in to other requests from the Nintendo developers.