N64’s Goldeneye: Nintendo suggested Bond shake hands with henchmen instead of killing them to make it less violent

"Good game, sir!"

Nintendo is a nice family company. Their games are about collecting coins and stars not shooting Soviet soldiers in the head from a distance of 0.5 feet with double RCP90s, blood shooting out in that bizarre way it did in 90s video games.

That was the worry for Nintendo chief and generally nice, sensitive guy Shigeru Miyamoto, who feared Goldeneye would be too violent and unrepentant.

“Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge,” co-designer Martin Hollis explained during a talk at the GameCity Festival in Nottingham.

“For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”

Miyamoto’s notes on the early version included a rather charming denouement to the game.

“One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible, I don’t think I did anything with that input,” Hollis said.

“The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”

What a delightful scene it would have been, Bond visiting some dilapidated Russian hospital to pass on his commiserations to Henchman #46 and all the other guys who had their legs blown off by proximity mines.

Ultimately, Hollis tried to balance the violence with a credits sequence where all the fallen characters were named and introduced.

“It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice,” he said. “The sequence told people that this was not real killing.”

(via The Guardian)