GoldenEra

Final Fantasy VII.

GoldenEye 007.

We were all really

I think we were all kind of at that stage

in our lives where we were really hungry to do something.

We were young and naive.

Young and inexperienced,

and had no idea what they were doing.

- I wanted to show people that I could do this.

It was our first game,

I don't think we knew quite what we had.

- It's a great lineup.

- The interactive title of the year.

It was a movie license

done by a small team of inexperienced

developers and somehow ended up being

the greatest first-person shooter of its era.

- This is one of the best video games

of all time.

- You couldn't ask for a better cocktail recipe.

Here's your spy playground.

- The guns, the gadgets, the cars,

the girls, the memorable villains, amazing exotic settings.

- One of the most important video games yet made,

had a transformative effect on the industry.

You can look at the video game landscape today

and trace back its origins in GoldenEye.

- GoldenEye is one of those wonderful games

that almost splits the game industry into two times.

There's before GoldenEye and there's after GoldenEye.

- Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield,

all of that goes back to GoldenEye.

First-person shooters were really this PC elite genre.

3D gaming was really coming to

the fore for the first time.

The social element, the friendship element,

the skill and personal achievement, right?

It's one package that sums up all the reasons

I play and want to make games.

- Ah, the 1990s, a time of innocence,

optimism, and social cohesion, and Spice Girls.

There were no mobile phones, no social media,

the internet was but a whisper on the wind

and TV consisted entirely of the same

old channels we'd had for decades.

The video games industry was still young,

widely considered to be the realm of children

and toy makers, but it was changing fast

as game makers were still discovering what games could be.

Many video games have graced our screens over the years,

few are played decades later,

even fewer change the way we play.

This is the story of a game that did just that.

- Rare was founded in the 1980s

by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper.

The Stamper brothers began their journey

developing a series of acclaimed titles

for the ZX Spectrum and built themselves

quite a reputation for innovative high quality games.

In 1985, their work caught the eye

of Japanese gaming giant Nintendo.

In fact, Nintendo loved what they saw so much,

they invested in the fledgling outfit,

taking a 49% shareholding in the company.

This relationship would go down as one of the most

fruitful collaborations in video game history.

Together, they would go on to create

some of the most beloved video games of the nineties.

- What's amazing is that Rare

is this just, really...

at the time, it was this really reclusive developer.

They didn't tell you anything.

They were very kind of secret,

and so secret that not many people knew where they

were based, and they were based on

what used to be a farm in the Midlands.

- Middle of England, a barn,

groups of people that had really not done

a lot of video game stuff before, were killing it.

- Twycross is absolutely,

there's nothing in it.

Twycross is a village that contains, it's got one pub.

It's got a private school.

A bit further up the road there's Twycross zoo

which is quite famous, but that is it.

- You have this extremely talented

cutting edge

game development studio out in the middle of nowhere, right?

In countryside in England.

- I mean over that period of what, six years,

they'd done some of the best 2D platformers,

some of the best 3D platformers,

one of the best fighting games,

one of the best racing games,

and certainly one of the best first-person shooters.

- People underestimate the influence

of Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper.

They were just absolutely always in complete sync.

There was never a point in time where

those two guys didn't agree on something.

There was always absolute solidarity

and they knew exactly what they wanted.

There was never a time you could say, we're not sure.

Tim would always know how it needs to be

for that to be fantastic.

- The whole point of Rare was to do things differently,

to not just make the same games

that have come before, but it works for them.

They're kind of isolated a little bit

in that they're on this kind of farm style campus.

They've got different barns,

so different buildings where the different teams

make different games and they are

just in this little Rare world.

- You know, when you buy a Nintendo game,

it would have the Nintendo seal of quality?

To me, the Rare logo, back then,

was the Nintendo seal of quality.

You knew you were getting an amazing game.

- You used to always want to make the fact

that the Rare logo should sell the game

without even knowing about the review.

You see that blue R on that game box, you buy it.

- They just didn't make bad games.

- Rare was a very sort of clandestine place in some respects

nobody ever did interviews,

no one knew what we were up to until the game came out.

No one had any idea because Tim and Chris

weren't interested in fame,

we just work on the games, we focus on the games,

make them the best they can be,

we put them out and they do the talking.

- Rare was a very important

and iconic developer

back during the nineties, you know.

It really pushed the boundaries,

not just with the N64.

So, they developed Donkey Kong Country.

That was a game which used pre-rendered 3D graphics.

And for it to be on that console

at that time, it looked amazing.

- They were able to render these gorgeous

3D models and then make them 2D sprites,

but they maintained almost the same level of graphical

fidelity as their original source models had.

It just made the Super Nintendo look

like it could be the next generation console.

It wasn't old. It was new again.

- It was evident back in Donkey Kong Country

where they were using 3D development stuff

in a 2D environment to give the illusion of a 3D world.

Nobody was doing that at all.

- So in the late nineties

we saw a lot of innovation around how games are played,

how games control, how camera systems work,

how progression in levels work, all of that stuff.

It was kind of this Wild West of developers

trying a whole bunch of different things.

And then, you know, over time,

certain things stuck around, certain things went away.

- The PC market was absolutely booming

thanks to the advent of 3D graphics cards.

- Welcome to the world of Doom.

A hellish nightmare for the more real...

- Because the PC was the home of the first-person shooter.

- We didn't call them first-person shooters.

We called them Doom clones

because everyone made games that were kind of like Doom.

- First-person shooters,

let's remember at the time, weren't a thing,

they weren't a genre.

They were just shooters in a 3D environment.

- The landscape for first-person shooters

was pretty young back then.

It was more about monster closets, fast paced shooting,

you know, skill-based gameplay,

but not really campaign-based

storytelling and puzzle solving.

- For me, FPS was just id games.

It was Wolfenstein and Doom because that's all I knew.

- And then moving into Quake and Unreal

around the same era as one another.

- You had kind of, you know

violent games beginning to kind of become popular.

And so you needed the consoles to match that.

- I'd seen really rad, awesome 3D stuff in the arcades

playing all sorts of video games like Virtua Cop and things.

But the concept of having three-dimensional

first-person shooter game at home was revolutionary.

- This transition from Mega Drive and Super Nintendo

to the PlayStation or even the Sega Saturn

adapting to these new forms is introducing

all these new challenges and problems.

- You'd seen some experimentations with 3D

on the Super Nintendo, things like Star Fox and F-Zero

and Pilotwings, and it was sort of fake 3D.

It wasn't really good 3D.

- Most interesting is how the different developers

kind of used this newfound power

of using the third dimension,