Archives

Bunker

Cradle

Frigate

Perimeter

Statue Park

Streets

GoldenEye was my first big title at Rare(although I didn’t know it at the time!) When I first got there in October 1995 I was put to work on the Donkey Kong 2 conversion from SNES to Gameboy. I got this out of the way quite quickly and was then asked if I’d like to help out on GoldenEye as Graeme Norgate was doing Blast Corps at the same time and was really busy. I knew we had the license to use the original Monty Norman theme so I got started. It was immense fun to write that video games music,I don’t know how many times I listened to all the past theme tunes from the movies, probably hundreds. It was the first time I’d had to do any sound design too, finding lots of gun shots and over the top ricochets was obviously my first task!

Something not a lot of people know is that GoldenEye wasn’t always the fantastic game it turned out to be, Nintendo actually stopped wanting it for some of its development cycle, Rare didn’t tell the team and let them keep making it confident that Nintendo would change their minds, which of course they did in the end!

Of all the memories I have of the GoldenEye times one always stands out. I used to be in what was called the chicken shed at Rare (it was a room next to the canteen that used to be where they kept the chickens when it was a Manor House) as there was no room for me in the music block. One day two people turned up and asked to listen to my stuff from GoldenEye, I sort of recognized Tim Stamper but the other guy I’d never seen before. Tim sat on the floor and this other guy sat in the chair, I was thinking how come the boss gets the floor, this guy must be super important. They didn’t say anything, just listened and said next, then when I’d played everything I had so far Tim just said, we’d like you to come and work on our game it’s called Dream, I said I hadn’t finished GoldenEye yet, he said he’d fix it and off they went. I later found out that the other guy was Greg Mayles, little did I know I’d be spending most of my time at Rare with him for the next 12 years!