“I was super lucky at Rare. I got to work on some of the best titles they did, just by fluke, and I didn’t really get how big GoldenEye was, until I got over to America. GoldenEye was gigantic in college dorms. That was the game that they all played at the time. I’m known as the Banjo-Kazooie guy a lot of the time, but GoldenEye outsold it.” explains Kirkhope.
“It is spectacular to be associated with something like that, a completely world changing game. Rare just couldn’t believe the success of all of our stuff back then. It was incredible. Every game we did was a massive success, just about. Thank our lucky stars we were there at the time, really.”
GoldenEye’s was, by some considerable margin, the best representation of a timepiece in a game, ever
WHEN WE MADE GOLDENERA …
Drew Roller wanted to share his love of GoldenEye with the rest of the world, so he made a documentary called GoldenEra about the shooter and its ongoing legacy.
When you set out to make your documentary, how did you pick exactly which aspects of the stories you wanted to focus on the most? Rare grew up in Twycross and blossomed into this global juggernaut of the gaming industry. They had a profound impact in those early days of the games industry. In that little quaint English village, nine people who had never made a game before, made something that changed the industry. Nintendo put quality above everything else.
They had the space there to learn, to grow, to innovate, and to fail, ultimately, and then reinvent themselves. The film sort of shows some of that failure and aspects of learning as they’re developing. So I knew the story was there and I knew that it would just be fun to just remember and go down memory lane. I knew that story would be a no-brainer if I could just reconnect people with their joy.
So were there any Rare perspectives on GoldenEye that you’d have liked to get for the film that weren’t available? We didn’t get all the team members. In
particular, Mark Edmonds, who was the lead programmer, is known to be fairly reclusive, and doesn’t really do interviews. So, he’s not in the film. But we had plenty of anecdotes about Mark. Everyone basically pays tribute to his genius, as the core driving force of the game and why they were able to iterate so quickly to be able to have that sort of fail fast mentality and try new things and learn. The Stampers are also notoriously
reclusive. We would have loved to chat to them about GoldenEye. I think, for the Stampers, GoldenEye was a game that challenged their vision of what video games should be, because they are known for Banjo-Kazooie and Donkey Kong Country, Diddy Kong Racing. Very family friendly stuff. GoldenEye, I believe to this day, is the most successful title for them. It swept up award after award. So while that game challenged them from an aesthetic point of view, it brought Rare incredible amounts of attention and praise. It would have been great to have their take on that for the documentary.
How long did the documentary take to make? From planning to shooting to editing, we took about five years, which is a long time. We’re an indie film studio, so we didn’t focus on it 100%. We started in 2017, worked with a producer
and started preliminary interviews with the development team. Two years later, after putting those interviews together, I started talking to Jim Miskell in the UK, about working with him on his film, Bringing Back GoldenEye. Throughout 2019 and 2020 we did principal photography, particularly in the UK, Australia, and Perth, and Canada. We spent 2020 in post-production, basically putting all the finishing touches on it. 2021 was negotiations with distributors. That part of the process takes a remarkable amount of time, but we’re hoping that now being in tandem with the 25th anniversary, we can ride that wave.
If you’d like to learn more about GoldenEra and where you can watch it, you can find all the info at
www.altitude.film/goldenera
August 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 65
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