| Leynos said: By the time 007 came to PS2 generation we had a bunch of 007 games. N64 had other 007 FPS outside of Goldeneye. Plus it was a post Halo world and the concept of consoles with good FPS games was no longer novel. PS2/Xbox is loaded with FPS games. Some from franchises you may not expect like Robotech. Remember Painkiller or Damnation? Got a lot of strange ones then Medal Of Honor and the first CoD. XIII and many many more. Nintendo tried their M rated FPS on Gamecube with Giest. 007 games were a dime a dozen by then. So was the genre. |
Geist being the supposed replacement for GoldenEye 007 is pretty much exhibit A on how you fail a console generation. It would be like Nintendo losing the Mario license and trying to replace that loss with Chibi Robo. Like what are we even doing here.
The Bond movies only grew in popularity in the 90s too, Tomorrow Never Dies had more box office than GoldenEye, then The World Is Not Enough did better than Tomorrow Never Dies, and even the shitty Die Another Day die more than Tomorrow Never Dies, and the switch over to the Daniel Craig era with Casino Royale sent the franchise into the stratosphere making it more popular than ever.
Bond was also a fantastic way for Nintendo to be "cool and sexy" in that era without having to be gratuitously violent/off-putting like GTA. Parents know Bond, they don't care if their kid is playing a Bond game, but Bond also fully passes the "this is one bad ass motherfucker" test of any teenager/college age kid too. It was the perfect fit for Nintendo in that sense.
Nintendo could have rode that wave of popularity, you're not inventing a character better than Bond, that just naive. Every other studio in Hollywood has tried for like 50 years.
Without GoldenEye 007 I honestly doubt the N64 itself would have hit 30+ million consoles. They would've finished somewhere in the 20s, that game carried the system hard, I knew several PS1 owners who basically broke and had to buy an N64 so they could have GoldenEye nights at their house on weekends or have it in their dorm room etc. etc.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 24 January 2026
