Nintendo puts a decent amount of emphasis on making sure that their games are friendly to younger communities, even if the game is rated for a mature audience. Most recently, we saw Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water get a lot less sexy in the West than its Japanese counterpart for this reason (despite the game rating).
In the 1990's things weren't very different. In fact, despite the fact that GoldenEye got an ESRB rating of Teen (ages 13+) on the Nintendo 64, Nintendo still wanted the developers to make it less bloody. If Rare had given in to all of Nintendo's wishes, GoldenEye definitely wouldn't have been the game we know today.
Rare's former game director, Martin Hollis, took to the GameCity festival in Nottingham to talk forging overseas relationships, using Nintendo and Rare's partnership as an example. According to Nottingham, Nintendo wanted the developers to tone down the game's bloody nature.
"Bond is a violent franchise and making that fit with Nintendo, which is very much family-friendly, was a challenge," noted Hollis. "For a while we had some gore, it was just a flipbook of about 40 textures, beautifully rendered gore that would explode out. When I saw it the first time, I thought it was awesome, it was a fountain of blood, like that moment in the Shining when the lift doors open. Then I thought, hmm, this might be a bit too much red.”
While Rare did tone down the game's bloodiness to some extent – they weren't completely giving in to other requests from the Nintendo developers. Especially the one that suggests there be less upclose killing.
Towards the end of the game's development, Rare got a fax from Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, with a a couple of suggestions for the game.“One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible. I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He 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.”
Hollis' team appeased Miyamoto's second point – except they didn't do it his way. Instead they used the game credits to introduce the characters that were killed, as though they were actors. The intention behind the sequence was to show people that it wasn't 'real killing.'
It's safe to say that Hollis' decision to draw a line on where Nintendo could make the calls was for the better.
[Guardian]
