In 1997 a licensed James Bond game grossed roughly $250 million, about 70 percent of the film's worldwide box office, on barely 3 percent of its production budget. This episode digs into how GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 came from a Rare team led by Martin Hollis with almost no commercial game experience, was originally pitched as a 2D Super Nintendo side-scroller, and ended up rewriting the rules of the first-person shooter.

We break down the unconventional choices: borrowing from Virtua Cop and Super Mario 64 rather than Doom, building levels from the film's architectural blueprints before designing any gameplay, David Doak's acoustic radius stealth system, windows the enemy AI treated as solid walls, and the four-player split-screen mode Steve Ellis hacked together in the final six months on a console with four megabytes of RAM. Then ...