Excerpt: How the designers of GoldenEye 007 made use of “Anti-Game Design”

In this excerpt from her upcoming book, writer and historian Alyse Knorr talks about some of the design decisions that made Goldeneye 007 stand out from other '90s first-person shooters, and why that design endures to this day. The book is currently looking for backers on Kickstarter.

When [game designer David] Doak first joined the team at the end of 1995, GoldenEye's levels were just barebones architecture-no objectives, enemies, or plot. After designing the watch menu, he and [game designer Duncan] Botwood started creating a single-player campaign that followed and expanded upon GoldenEye the movie's narrative-a difficult task, considering the fact that the film's dialogue about Lienz Cossack traitors and Kyrgyz missile tests went over the heads of quite a few 12-year-olds. Doak and Botwood's job was to tell this complicated story using rudimentary pre- and post-mission cutscenes, pre-mission briefing paperwork, in-game conversations with NPCs, and mission objectives, which proved the most powerful way to allow players to experience the story themselves.

Read 58 remaining paragraphs | Comments