Cover art also by T1na Badgraph1csghost
Now Playing. "It's Iron Curtains for You" by T1na Badgraph1csghost
Containing a very small portion of the "James Bond Theme" by Monty Norman
...And, "The James Bond Theme"
Containing a big honkin' portion of the "James Bond Theme" by Monty Norman. In fact, it's a cover.
Cover art also by T1na Badgraph1csghost
The Nintendo 64 was released at exactly the right time to be part of the early internet's rumour mill. People spun increasingly complicated yarns about games' hidden features, alternative ports, and pre-development discussion. Some people went the extra mile and fabricated evidence of their story, like purported screenshots featuring Luigi in Super Mario 64. Since GoldenEye was the most popular FPS since Doom, literal hundreds of fansites sprang up on Geocities, Lycos, Tripod, and AOL, all with varying degrees of reliability. The most popular rumour was that the game had been planned for Super NES, but was changed to the Nintendo 64 at the last minute.
Anyone who was even a little familiar with software development at the time knew that was a load of bunk. You can't just make a Super NES game, then suddenly turn on your heels in mid-stride and convert it to a high-poly 3D game for Nintendo 64. The assembly languages are different, the SDKs were different, the hardware was different. Then, of course, there's the Nintendo 64. No one had made a 64-bit game console before! Let alone one with 3D capability (Atari claimed the Jaguar was 64-bit, but it was really just a pair of 32-bit chips that couldn't even work in tandem with each other to find 1+1). Rare was working on GoldenEye before the film's screenplay had been finalised. Sets were still being built, locations were still being scouted, Rare had to make a game engine before they could even make the game, but more than that, they needed a film to work from. That didn't exist until most of the way through development on the main code. That's why so many of the maps don't look like anything familiar; some of them were drafted before the film was complete.
Nintendo also claimed that a game based on the GoldenEye film was in development for the Virtual Boy, but the hardware was discontinued before anything more could come of that. Rareware wouldn't have been working on that anyway, being stretched so thin on their other projects (DKC 3, Killer Instinct, Blast Corps, Twelve Tales, Project Dream, and GoldenEye were all being worked on simultaneously). In all likelihood, that game was being made by Domark, the company responsible for The Duel on Mega Drive.
So, what's that song from then, if not the fabled SNES GoldenEye? Nothing. This game does not exist. Back in 2016, I was going through a new Super NES obsession and decided to make up like 10 games that do not exist for that platform, and one of those was a James Bond game. Without going into the plot too much ('cos I still want to make this game without the Bond elements and I don't need anyone nicking my ideas), this song would have been one of the stealth mission themes. The game's pretty much evenly-split between stealth, action, and driving in Mode 7. Since it's James Bond, obviously there'd be the gunbarrel intro, which meant a cover of the theme as well. The Bond Theme contains a bit of optimisation that I forgot to cover in Game Music 101: in order to get the 5-note brass chord, I sampled myself playing the chord on the SC55, then turned that into its own instrument, which I played at 2 octaves. This meant I wouldn't have to commit 5/8 of the Super NES's sound capability to a single instrument.
If these sound a little too high-def for the Super NES, that's because they are. I didn't bother following my own instructions and resampling things. I'll probably do that at some point later, but I had other things I wanted to do today, so... yeah. Regardless of sample quality, I did restrict myself to the known instrumentation from the SNES SDK—namely the Proteus/1 and Korg M1—plus the SC55. This game was supposedly developed in 1996, so the SC55 makes sense. In the development lore, the project's composer is a fan of Koji Kondo and she chose her studio setup based on the gear that Kondo had.
Was this post more of an excuse to put SNES Bond art on my blog than dispel 27-year-old rumours? Yeah.
--19 June 2024--