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A third of the original GoldenEye development team still works at legendary British studio Rare, VideoGamer.com has learned.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com at the Develop conference in Brighton last week, senior software engineer Nick Burton, who has been at the company since 1998, hit back at critics of the studio who have claimed Rare no longer has FPS talent.
From 1998 to 1999 a number of key developers who worked on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark on the N64 left Rare to form Free Radical Design, famed for the Timesplitters series and the more recent PS3 exclusive Haze.
At Develop, Burton told us: “We read all those things as well. All the talent, you know, just because you see Viva Piñata doesn’t mean that the talent has gone, because that kind of pains me when you hear about that sometimes. Especially with the GoldenEye guys. About a third of the GoldenEye team are still at Rare. A couple of them did a lot of stuff on it. Everyone’s like “GoldenEye was done by these guys”. No, it was done by a team of people.
“Some of our designers, when you look at them and how they analyse things, especially if they have a specialisation like FPS or multiplayer level design, the way they can analyse stuff almost spoils your gaming sometimes. You come in saying how you’re really enjoying something and then “well that bit was rubbish wasn’t it?” No. “It was because there was this, this and this.” And you go yeah, I did get stuck there actually.”
For more from Rare’s Nick Burton head over to part one of our week-long interview, from which you’ll be led effortlessly into part two and part three.
