Indisputably an industry touchstone, Quake was one of many first-person shooters released during the genre's golden age of the 1990s. To further illustrate the era's creativity and innovation, I spoke with developers of other shooters to learn about their contributions—and in many cases, how id Software's work served as their foundation and influence.

To Be Determined

David Doak and his colleagues couldn't wrap their heads around Quake's hype.

Not the game's technical accomplishments. Writing a true 3D engine capable of six degrees of freedom was impressive. On the surface, however, Quake's visuals didn't turn heads at Rare.

"It was an interesting time because the consoles—notably Saturn, PlayStation, and Nintendo 64—were comparable in terms of graphics performance to high-end PCs," said Doak, a programmer. "We thought Quake didn't look as good as GoldenEye. To us it was pixelated and mostly brown."

Rare's developers were more than qualified to pass judgment on graphics. Founded in 1985 by brothers Chris and Tim Stamper, the UK-based company got its start writing games for computers such as the ZX Spectrum. After a Nintendo executive claimed that its NES would never be reverse-engineered, the startup's developers hacked the console and sent tech demoes to Nintendo. Impressed, the gaming giant wrote Rare a blank check in exchange for games developed exclusively for its 8-bit console.

Nintendo's money seeded a litany of projects, from TMNT-inspired beat-em-up Battletoads to action-racer R.C. Pro Am. Each successive hit bolstered Nintendo's confidence, leading the publisher to increase its ownership stake in Rare from 25 percent to 49 percent.

In 1994, Nintendo offered the Stampers carte blanche to create a game starring any character in its star-studded roster. The team wanted to plant their flag in the soil of a franchise that had fallen by the wayside, ruling out A-listers such as Mario and Zelda. They chose Donkey Kong, Mario's one-time rival who had since been relegated to guest-star status in titles such as 1992's Super Mario Kart.

The result was Donkey Kong Country, a 2D platformer wrought from pre-rendered 3D models that breathed new life into the 16-bit Super Nintendo just when 32-bit consoles threatened the platform's market share. During the same period, Rare partnered with Midway to develop Killer Instinct, a fighting game sporting polygonal characters and detailed backgrounds that ran on an early version of Nintendo's Ultra 64 console hardware—a marketing claim that was only partially accurate.

When Chris Stamper and Rare programmer Pete Cox broke ground on Killer Instinct, Nintendo had yet to finalize the Ultra 64's specifications. Stamper and Cox engineered a mongrelized board composed of a 64-bit processor and the Ultra 64's file format to read and write data. A hard disk was added so artists could render highly detailed characters and animations. The console's exact memory and graphics chip had yet to be determined.

Although an attract screen teased a Killer Instinct port for Ultra 64, the console was still an embryo. Rare pivoted by paring the game down for the Super Nintendo in 1995.

On Rails

Rare prospered despite uncertainty surrounding the Ultra 64. The team had grown from a modest 80 developers to nearly 300, leading the Stampers to move the company out of their manor farmhouse in Twycross, England, and into larger facilities. Their next order of business was to splinter their unwieldy team into smaller units and tackle multiple projects. One of those, directed by Martin Hollis, would be based on superspy James Bond.

"Nintendo acquired the Bond license," Doak recalled. "It was offered to Rare, and the initial idea was that the game would be a side-scrolling platformer/shooter with pre-rendered sprites like Donkey Kong Country."

Rare's original plan was to develop its Bond action-platformer for the Super Nintendo. Eager to move on to greener pastures, Hollis proposed a Virtua Cop-style shooter for the Nintendo 64, formerly branded the Ultra 64.

Virtua Cop was one of many rail shooters popular in arcades during the 1990s and early 2000s. Set from a first-person perspective, rail shooters automatically moved players along predetermined paths and showed them fixed camera angles. When enemies popped out from behind cover, players pointed plastic guns at the screen and pumped them full of lead to advance. Although ammo tended to be unlimited, players had to manage their rounds by pointing the gun to one side and squeezing the trigger to reload.

Over time, GoldenEye 007's on-rails direction mutated, evolving into a free-roaming first-person shooter in the vein of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. There was just one minor hitch. The Nintendo 64's hardware was still up in the air when production on GoldenEye had kicked off in early 1995 as a tie-in to the MGM film of the same name, slated for release that November—roughly the same timeframe in which Nintendo hoped to launch the N64.

Virtua Cop.

"Martin Hollis, Mark Edmonds, and Steve Ellis are excellent software engineers," said Doak, who did not join the GoldenEye team until after production had begun. "They did a great job, and it is particularly worth remembering that the game engine was created from scratch on prototype hardware."

To the surprise of no one at Rare, Nintendo postponed the N64's launch until sometime in 1996. Hollis didn't sweat the delay. He preferred that he and his team take their time. Not that they had a choice. Until Nintendo nailed down specs, publishing partners such as Rare were left without official development kits, forcing GoldenEye's engineers to guesstimate on hardware.

They knew, for instance, that the N64's controller would feature at least half a dozen buttons and a directional pad, as well as a single joystick tiny enough to be manipulated by the player's thumb. Until Nintendo sent them a development kit, they jerry-rigged Sega Saturn gamepads to test the game. Artists modeled characters and environments on a Silicon Graphics Onyx workstation. Later, they had to pivot. The final N64 hardware pumped out polygons faster than their SG machines, but GE007's textures bogged down performance. Consequently, those textures were halved to fit on N64 cartridges and keep gameplay running at a steady frame rate.

"There was lots of work optimising and reworking content in the last year of development," Doak admitted.

Rather than bemoan the console's limitations, GoldenEye's developers—many of whom had never made a game before being assigned to the Bond project—devised clever workarounds. To lighten the N64 processor's load, artists redid colored textures in black and white. The result was increased game performance and a higher resolution; colors were tinctured onto select vertices, points on the surface of 2D or 3D surfaces, as needed.

"Everyone on the team was learning and improving as we went along," Doak said. "We were all enthusiastic videogame players and it felt like we were doing our dream job."

Interesting Spaces

Late in the making of the GoldenEye film, members of Rare's team visited the set. Some were Bond fans, but the trip wasn't made for pleasure. They were on business. The developers took photographs and collected blueprints of locations. Back at the office, artists looked to the assets as points of reference while they created level geometry.

Well aware of the pitfalls of working on a licensed property, Rare was careful not to stray too far from the film's story. The game opens in a faithful recreation of the Byelomorye Dam setting, culminating with players stepping off the top of the dam and triggering a cutscene of Bond strapping into a harness and bungee-jumping to the bottom, just like Pierce Brosnan's silver screen incarnation.

From there, players proceed to the facility. Their goal is to meet up with fellow 00-agent Alec Trevalyn and plant explosives to destroy the plant, where Trevalyn is apparently killed after a Soviet commander executes him. The agent later turns up alive and reveals himself to be a double agent. Players get their shot at revenge on the final mission when they chase their one-time compatriot high up in the air across the perilous beams and bridges of a satellite.

However, the team had no intentions of creating a one-to-one adaptation. "It was very much an organic, iterative process, and that method of testing and refining the feel and play experience in-game was absolutely vital," Doak explained.

GoldenEye left players in control during in-game cutscenes, furthering their immersion.

GoldenEye's story was expanded through extra levels, sequences, and set pieces. The designers iterated time and again, adding hallways and rooms almost haphazardly: Much of the geometry in each level served no purpose other than to imbue areas with a realistic, lived-in quality. Some passageways offer alternate routes for players to find.

Elements of the game's on-rails direction survived the transition to free-roaming shooter. Shooting enemies in the leg triggers a different reaction than shooting their groin, upper torso, head, or hands. At certain junctures, the camera automatically adjusts to highlight items or areas of interest. such as at the beginning of Facility when players crawl through ventilation and are pointed toward a guard loitering in a bathroom stall. Players can ignore him and drop down, or aim their pistol at his head and dispatch him in a single shot. (Two, if they aim just right and knock his hat off first.)

Other nods to rail shooters cropped up. GoldenEye's weapons hold a limited amount of ammunition in their chambers. Players must adopt a strategic mindset, picking their shots and reloading after each fight so they're prepared for the next encounter. On certain assignments, players are penalized for shooting NPCs.

Rare fleshed out the GoldenEye film's beats as well as its vistas. Before each mission, players receive a dossier with info on the next assignment as well as four difficulty levels. Higher difficulties charge them with half a dozen or more objectives, fewer ammo and armor pickups, and swarms of tougher enemies. Not all objectives are mandatory, and only a fraction of them were derived from the GoldenEye film, but completing them lets players unlock bonuses such as cheat codes and multiplayer modes and modifiers.

"I very strongly believe that it is impossible to design video games on paper," Doak said. "The narrative and character-based events in the film provided a framework for pacing and objectives, which was very useful as it pushed the design towards more ambitious goals. We consciously tried to make different levels play differently. There wasn't any real reference for storytelling in action games at that time. We made up the rules as we went along."

One of the rules Rare made up entailed how players handle conflict. GoldenEye's panoply of pistols, automatics, rocket launchers, proximity mines, and throwing knives suited gunslingers looking to paint walls in bullet holes. However, the team's technical ingenuity made prudence an equally valid approach.

Players inclined toward stealth can memorize patrol paths and weave around enemies. If they slip up, though, guards have ways to track them down. Every gun has a radius that blooms around the player when fired. Any enemy within range comes running. After firing, the radius shrinks. Fire too soon and it grows, increasing the odds of alerting nearby enemies, while guns equipped with silencers trigger a negligible radius.

"Stealth and indirect action and consequences were always on the wish list of features," Doak remembered. "Martin [Hollis] has often spoken about guards who run to activate alarms rather than directly attacking the player as a fundamental design decision in GoldenEye."

Players are able to see through windows but, unbeknownst to many, enemies cannot. Doak hand-waved away that decision as intentionally unrealistic: It gives players a fun advantage and introduces strategic possibilities: spy on enemies, then burst in with knowledge of the most dangerous foes or skirt around buildings and evade any chance of detection.

Except for the occasional cutscene that opens or closes a mission, players remain in control of their avatar. They can watch the action, seek a more advantageous position, or set up traps, such as scattering remote-detonation mines across gas tanks when guards storm into a room full of gas tanks near the end of Facility.

"That was a deliberate decision," Doak confirmed. "The goal was to immerse the player in the role of Bond as much as possible without interruption. Making these interactive scenes work in the game involved a considerable amount of work and required adding many bespoke AI and scripting elements to the game engine. This is a good example of our joyful naiveté, or blind foolhardiness."

Players could dual-wield certain weapons.

License to Split Screens

One afternoon in the spring of 1997, Steve Ellis and Duncan Botwood shut themselves in a room and pulled up GoldenEye's code. The game was nearly finished. The campaign was ready to be put through another round or two of testing and then locked down. A master version of the game would be sent to Nintendo for approval, at which point marketing and distribution would take over.

Before that could happen, Ellis and Botwood set about writing one last feature.

"Multiplayer was always a wish-list feature," Doak said. "Everyone on the team was very keen to have it in the game, and the N64 had four controller ports."

Ellis deemed it necessary to wait until production came down to the wire. While Rare had long since grown into a multi-million-dollar studio, the Stampers did not spend money pell-mell. GoldenEye's team was lean and mean, and unable to justify the time and resources necessary to write a robust set of multiplayer features—until they got a chance to fly under management's radar.

"It was only fairly late in the dev process that people were free enough to be able to work on it," Doak continued. "Even then the fact that it was being worked on was hidden from management because the game was 'late.' Steve and Duncan were effectively a micro team secretly adding multiplayer to the game."

Ellis and Botwood drew inspiration from two sources. The first was GoldenEye itself. The game's single-player mode was a cornucopia of difficulty levels and options players could tweak to their liking. Multiplayer should be no different. The second was Bomberman, an action-puzzler on the Super Nintendo and a source of camaraderie during lunch breaks. It was fun, fast, and deeply customizable—all qualities that the top-secret micro team sought to transplant into GoldenEye.

Since the code for weapons, hit detection, and navigation was more or less in place, Ellis and Botwood put together a prototype in record time. Building multiplayer modes boiled down to creating custom maps based on architecture used in the campaign, writing code to split the screen up to four different ways, and adding basic rules such as a time limit or kill count to decide winners in deathmatch.

Their clandestine operation quickly paid off. The rest of the team followed their progress and stayed late to help test deathmatch. "Part of working at Rare was never going home," Doak said.

As Ellis and Botwood added features, Doak and the others had a harder time putting down the controller and getting back to work or catching up on sleep. Multiplayer was fun. Players could choose arenas and play five different modes, most named after Bond films. In The Man with the Golden Gun, a single golden gun able to kill opponents in one shot is placed in a level. The Living Daylights challenges players to hold a flag for the longest amount of time, while You Only Live Twice grants each player two lives before they're eliminated for good. License to Kill grants every player the ability to kill enemies in a single shot, and Normal offers standard deathmatch in free-for-all or team flavors.

Customization runs deep. Players can modify settings such as which weapons will appear on maps, as well as enable cheat codes unlocked by advancing through the campaign—not all of which were available in multiplayer in order to keep the playing field even.

Rare's David Doak traded code repositories for a lab coat in the Facility level of GoldenEye 007.

According to Doak, "The cheats were a combination of obvious classic practical features: invincibility, weapon unlocks, adjustable difficulty, and infinite ammo; plus, things which were technically possible but not 'canon' to the Bond IP. Things like DK mode—scaled heads and limbs—and paintball—rainbow-coloured decals—were fun and in keeping with the general tone of Rare and Nintendo products."

Word of GoldenEye's addictive multiplayer spread beyond Rare's walls. "There was an internal black market in distributing builds to the other teams—unusual in Rare because teams didn't routinely play each other's games during development, and because the Nintendo QA teams, particularly [Nintendo of America's] Treehouse loved it," Doak recalled. "However, none of us realised how big a thing it would become and also how important it would be to the continued sales and success of the game. Single-player was good, but multiplayer made GoldenEye an essential purchase."

Control Freaks

In 2001, Bungie set the template for console shooters with Halo: Combat Evolved. From the moment players step into the space-age armor of Master Chief, the Xbox controller and Halo's control scheme seem inexorably linked. Two analog sticks makes movement a breeze, and the eight buttons are thoughtfully mapped to functions ranging from jump, crouch, lob grenades, and fire.

Halo's default control scheme has been borrowed countless times since, and with little variation. Bungie's implementation feels so natural that even GoldenEye's diehard fans may find playing the game awkward and limiting. David Doak points out a good reason for why the N64 title's controls may feel alien to players after more than a decade of Halo, Call of Duty, and Battlefield sequels.

"GoldenEye was made when there was no established model for FPS control on a console," explained Doak. "It is also important to remember that at the time, the single analogue stick on the N64 controller was a revolutionary design."

Button mappings for GoldenEye.

Doak and his fellow engineers faced an uphill battle in transplanting movement from a genre traditionally played on keyboards with 128 or more keys to a controller with nine buttons and a single stick. Their first step was to understand the fundamentals of movement.

Most FPS games depend on four axes: moving forward and backward; strafing, or sidestepping to the left and right; turning left and right; and looking up and down. Using the N64's directional pad was not an option. It was digital, precluding the range of movement inherent in analog devices. Depending on how much pressure players applied to the stick, characters could creep, walk, run, or sprint. Another problem was that the directional pad was to the left of the analog stick, itself positioned below the middle grip of the controller's M-shaped contours. To use both the d-pad and the stick, players would have to place their left hand on the pad and hold the middle grip with their right, requiring them to strain to reach the six face buttons on the right side of the controller.

Rare mapped movement and turning to the analog stick. "Moving forward and backward, and turning are the two most essential controls for getting around. Strafe is important, but not as important as turning," Doak said.

Strafing was mapped to the controller C-left and C-right buttons. The game's free-aim mechanic is a two-step process. First, players hold the R trigger. A reticule appears that can be freely manipulated. "Perhaps the biggest challenge for GoldenEye was that on PC mouse-aim is an absolutely precise mechanic, but with a console controller it is necessary to implement this with some kind of relative input," Doak continued. "In aim mode, GoldenEye uses the analogue stick to control the aiming reticule so, when aiming, the player can access the maximum precision that the controller can offer."

 The tradeoff to free aiming is that players cannot aim while moving or turning. It's a drawback, albeit one that appeals to those who appreciate strategy. Skilled players, especially ones with experience playing deathmatch on PC, know that Doak hit the nail on the head: Movement is more important than pixel-perfect aiming. Moving targets are harder to hit, and unless an opponent is on a higher or lower level, all they really need to do is point in their opponent's general direction and let fly, especially when firing weapons that deal damage in a large radius, such as rockets, and automatics that spit out rounds fast such as the KF7 Soviet.

GoldenEye let a single player plug in two controllers to play the game with two analog sticks.

On top of that, Rare programmers baked in handicaps that facilitate serviceable aiming without making players feel like the game is playing for them. One of GoldenEye's subtler assists concerns turning. Performance drops when the screen fills up with lots of characters and particle effects from bullets and explosions; predicting that players—especially inexperienced ones—confronted with such scenarios would be more likely to fire and aim frantically, the code lends a steady hand.

"The player's gun can move through a fairly large arc without requiring the player to turn," Doak explained. Once players pick up that they don't need to flail around, they'll begin to move less erratically and pointlessly, which has the clever side effect of making them feel cool under pressure, just like their suave avatar. Other helpful effects include gently panning the camera up or down when the player comes into contact with inclines such as stairs, cutting back on the times when players need to touch the analog stick.

Although Doak was candid in admitting that Rare largely ignored conventions of PC shooters, GoldenEye's wide selection of input settings is (unwittingly) reminiscent of PC developers' willingness to reconfigure each and every key and mouse click. GoldenEye is not that granular, but there are enough presets that most players should be able to find one that feels natural.

"We were well aware of the compromises we had to make to deal with the single analogue stick, so we wanted to have options to cater for player preferences," said Doak. "You should also note that we allowed for using two controllers for a single player. That was the only way at the time of getting two analogue sticks."

Primordial Ooze

Like many early 3D games, some parts of GoldenEye 007 have aged poorly. Its character models, given the faces of developers at Rare—including David Doak, who makes a cameo as a scientist on the Facility stage—are blocky and low-res. As far as input modalities, even ex-Rare developers admit that its control scheme became antiquated a mere four years after its release.

Look past the game's rough veneer and relatively limited control scheme, and you'll find a kernel of fun that has been preserved over 20 years and counting. GE007's campaign was good, but the team's belief in multiplayer strapped on a rocket that shot the game to critical and commercial success. Rare sold over eight million copies of GoldenEye, making it the third highest-selling N64 game ever behind Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64.

That record can be attributed to teens and college kids. The game became a staple of dorm rooms and social gatherings all across the United States, offering a pick-up-and-play experience that appealed to all players but especially ones who lacked the know-how or the patience to jump through technical hoops required to get a game of Quake or Duke Nukem 3D up and running on PC.

Four-player, split-screen deathmatch became a staple in living rooms and dorm rooms for most of the N64's lifecycle.

Moreover, GoldenEye testified to Nintendo's long-held belief that a roomful of friends and family pilling onto sofas and gathering around a single screen makes for a more social multiplayer experience than strangers typing messages to arcane screen names.

"Before Halo, there was GoldenEye," remembered former PC Gamer editor-in-chief Rob Smith. "And there’s sort of a weird camaraderie. Like, if you were there when GoldenEye happened you were part of a club. I’d been there before that club, but I still felt an acknowledgment when I became part of that GoldenEye club. You remember the couch, the big screen that would look so tiny today, and then the gameplay. It worked."

For David Doak, the memories of developing GoldenEye 007 will always feel fresh, even if aspects of the game do not. "We would often set our sights on ambitious features which more experienced developers might have not even attempted to implement," he said. "When this worked it was incredibly satisfying. When it didn't, we were robust and optimistic enough to be able to move on. It was a small team. We shared a similar sense of humour and there was a lot of mutual respect. It was extremely hard and long work, but also very enjoyable and memorable."

Enjoying Rocket Jump? Click here to share your thoughts with other Shackers in the Chatty.