the film ultimately affected the development process very little. It certainly defined the overall story, and several of the many locations that the spy would visit, but both the game design and the score were instead developed through a process of trial- and-error, focused by a keen adoration for the suave character and his ongoing adventures.
the last 25 years, regardless of the many advancements in technologies and tools.
Until Halo came along a few years later, GoldenEye set the standard for first- person shooters on console
“I think the way I compose music now is just the same as it was back then,” explains Kirkhope. “I might be a bit better at it these days, though I’m not a very intellectual composer. I load up samples and I mess around with the keyboard until I think I’ve found something that I like. A melody or a set of chords.” Of course, the composer didn’t really have much of a choice when he took on the challenge of making music for an officially licensed James Bond adventure. “With the Bond game that was decided for me. It was going to be the bottom chords. Everybody knows the melody.” says Kirkhope, humming the ever-familiar notes before he continues on. “So that’s what I was going to use, and try and embellish it a little bit in-between. As a huge Bond fan, to get to use the iconic melody that everybody recognizes around the world was pretty special.”
“The team did get to visit the filming of the movie” recalls Kirkhope, “but I didn’t go to that, as I joined the team a little bit later. I did get to go to see the next movie because the [GoldenEye] game was so late! I guess it was a lot of ‘Bond is Bond’, right? We were all massive Bond fans from back when we were kids. When a Bond movie came out, it was the best film of the year. Best effects, best music, best everything.
“I think what also helped was the fact that no one on the team had really made a game before. So none of us knew what we were doing. So you just stick it together best you can. I think sometimes that’s the way the best games get made, because once you seem to know what you’re doing, it’ll get out to a bunch of managers and things all go wrong.”
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN SONGS
Despite being brand new to the games industry when working on GoldenEye, Kirkhope has found that his approach to making music for games hasn’t changed too much over
64 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2022
Kirkhope does recognise the flaws of the GoldenEye soundtrack by his modern standards, though, and is keen to share an anecdote that points out just how green he was at the time. “When I first started, I asked GoldenEye’s director Martin Hollis, ‘How long should the music be?’ and he said ‘Write about a minute or two and then loop it around. So I said, ‘Oh great, I’ll just do that.’.” he laughs. “I had no idea people could be playing those levels for 20 minutes! So I think I should have made every tune a bit longer. It should have been three to five minutes long. I would do that differently now. But I think apart from that, I think it is what it is, and I think it suits the game.”
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER GoldenEye sits alongside mega-hits like Banjo-Kaoozie and Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle within Kirkhope’s body of work, which is basically a list made up entirely of console classics. Having worked on so many popular titles, it would be hard for anyone to pick out a favorite, but the composer confirms that he does understand just how big the spy adventure was.
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