The question: how the best first-shooter game in the 1990s - GoldenEye 007 - was able to slip past Nintendo's conventional family-oriented theme, where even red blood from the game Mortal Kombat was mandated to be removed? Veteran game director Martin Hollis has some old chestnut story to share.

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The Guardian reports that during the recent GameCity Festival in Nottingham, game consul Hollis brought forth the story behind the making of GoldenEye 007 between Nintendo and game developer Rare for Nintendo 64.

"Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge," he said.

Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario, reportedly sent a fax to the rare team and offered some suggestions. As per Hollis, Miyamoto pointed out some things to consider: first, he was concerned of "too much close-up killing" and second, he thought that "the game was too tragic, with all the killing..." He further suggested that "it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital."

Although Hollis did not take the advice, he rolled out a credit sequence instead, which "told people that this was not real killing," he said. At the end of the game, characters are put forward as if they were real actors. "It was very filmic, and the key thing was, it underlined that this was artifice," he explained.

It took the then-independent Rare team - which was only ten people - almost two years and a $2M allocation to create the best of the 90s.

Years after the success, it was a surprise that the team refused to consider developing another James Bond-based game. In the interview, he said "out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it."

Instead the group is working on its new project Perfect Dark, which he claimed as a total "spiritual sequel."

TagsGoldenEye 007, Mortal Kombat, Super Mario, Nintendo games, Rare developer, Perfect Dark