GoldenEye 007's Multiplayer Was Added in a Month, Off the Books

Until March or April 1997, the Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye 007 had no multiplayer mode. The disc was already past schedule. It was a single-player shooter loosely tracking the 1995 film, four years into development at Rare's Twycross studio in Leicestershire. Then Steve Ellis, one of the programmers, decided to try splitting the screen.

He gave himself about a month. The team's director, Martin Hollis, recounted the sequence at a Game Developers Conference postmortem in 2012: Ellis built deathmatch on his own, the team kept it quiet, and management at both Rare and Nintendo were not told. "It was done without the knowledge or permission of the management at Rare and Nintendo," Ellis later said. By the time anyone in a position to cancel it saw the mode, it ran.

Hollis credited the secrecy to Rare's hands-off culture. He described stretches as long as six months in which no Rare or Nintendo manager visited the team's offices. Several other features were "snuck in" the same way over the course of development. The studio trusted its leads, and the leads used the slack.

The game shipped in August 1997. The single-player Bond campaign reviewed well. The four-controller deathmatch — the one Ellis squeezed in — became the reason the cartridge stayed in college dorms for the next decade and the reference point the next two console generations of console shooters were measured against. Hollis has since said in interviews that if the team had asked permission, the schedule pressure would have killed the idea before it shipped.