Shigeru Miyamoto is a legendary designer credited with creating Mario and Legend of Zelda among many other franchises. I'm sure glad he wasn't in charge of GoldenEye 007, though.
GoldenEye 007 co-designer Martin Hollis said at GameCity festival (via The Guardian) that the developers received a fax with suggestions from Miyamoto:
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.
Obviously the team at Rare didn't use these suggestions. They did find a more subtle way to tell audiences that there game was fictional, though. At the end of the credits, they showed each character and their name. A title card announced the the cast as "the actors," to calm anyone worried that these virtual characters were actually hurt and killed. They're just playing roles in a virtual movie.
Miyamoto's fax demonstrates what a strange fit GoldenEye 007 was for a Nintendo console. Nintendo has always tried to keep their game consoles as family-friendly as possible. However, it's hard to make a squeaky-clean game based on James Bond, a womanizing secret agent who kills scores of people.
Nintendo, to their credit, seems to have given Rare a lot of freedom. GoldenEye 007 is as violent and realistic as most shooters of that era. The only real concession seems to have been blood and gore. There's no splatter or dismemberment in the game. Instead, a red tint appears on a character when they're shot. Hollis mentions that they developed about 40 textures of "beautifully rendered gore" that were presumably nixed by Nintendo.
While the game was a lot more violent than Miyamoto's creations, Hollis said that Rare did look to his games for inspiration in many ways. He cited Mario 64 and Link to the Past as major influences:
I studiously tried to learn what Nintendo was. I played [Zelda] Link to the Past from beginning to end – I got all the hearts and all but two of the quarter hearts. I could write a thousand pages about that game. Then Mario 64 came out during the development of GoldenEye and we were clearly influenced by that game. Ours was much more open as a result.
The end result of Rare and Nintendo's collaboration was one of the best shooters and N64 games ever made. What's even more surprising than its success is the fact that there was no sequel. Hollis mentioned that they turned down the opportunity to make a game based on the later Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. Nintendo was very accepting of their decision, too.
You might’ve thought that on a commercial basis someone at Nintendo, even lower down or higher up or whatever, would’ve said, “Well, are you sure?”, but out of respect for the creator and the importance of the people who actually made the game, that was it.
