Hindsight being what it is, I would've gone to Rare and done the following in late 1997 --
Insisted they make another Bond game. If they wanted to make a game called Perfect Dark with aliens and what not -- great. Greenlight that too. But a new Bond game is for Nintendo, and fast track that for the 1999 holiday season.
Perfect Dark could continue on development as a GameCube launch title, as the game barely ran on the N64 anyway.
Sometimes you gotta lay down the law a little bit as a publisher/owner, you can't just let the designers make whatever they want. It's like letting inmates run the asylum. A game like GoldenEye comes out of nowhere and sells 7 million copies? Not making a sequel to that would be like not making a sequel to Donkey Kong Country, just not good business.
In the long term it would've been good for Rare too, because a new Bond game for November 1999, probably could've crushed another 5-6+ million plus and that would've sealed the deal on Nintendo keeping Rare for the next 5-6 years IMO. So Rare wouldn't have had to have dealt with the crappy Microsoft era where most of the employees left anyway.
