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Ken Lobb looks back on the work that went into GoldenEye, how his name became a gun's name
Coming from a Game Informer interview with Ken Lobb...
On the early days of creating GoldenEye, original Virtua Cop inspiration and utilizing the N64's 4 controller ports...
“Let’s just say, the ‘bigs,’ or the more experienced Rare developers were busy. They also weren’t super thrilled about making a game with a license. The license had come from Japan, from Mr. [Hiroshi] Yamauchi. He started the negotiations for it. Tim and Chris had agreed to take on the project. But the people making Donkey Kong, Banjo, Killer Instinct – they’re all busy. So, Martin Hollis and a little group of people began working on it.
They worked in barns at the time. Rare was called the Manor Farmhouse. It was this beautiful old farmhouse with a bunch of developers in it, and all these barns that were converted into development spaces. One was for Banjo, one was Killer Instinct, the smallest one had Martin Hollis, David Doak, and the whole team behind GoldenEye. I was visiting Rare a lot, once every 8 to 10 weeks to work on Killer Instinct 2. Actually, the end of Killer Instinct and into Killer Instinct 2, while they were making GoldenEye. I developed a friendship with Martin. That had a couple, shall we say, interesting impacts…”
They started making GoldenEye, and their inspiration was Virtua Cop. It was literally a rail shooter. I had helped convince Nintendo Japan that we should have four controller ports on the Nintendo 64. That was fun. They kept telling me how much it was going to cost, but it definitely helped the N64. Because of that, I was trying to get as many games as we could to support four players. I was also like, ‘You’re making a rail shooter on this analog stick. I bet we could do a first-person shooter.’ And they’re against that. ‘No, no no. We don’t have time; we have to hit this date.’
They were focused on something that was cooler than Virtua Cop, because they were going after location-based damage. The first tech they did was ‘shoot them in the hand, they drop their gun; shoot them in the butt, they jump in the air; shoot them in the hat, the hat flies off.’ All that kind of fun stuff. I went back two or three times between the time I saw the game and when it was announced at the Shoshinaki trade show in 1995. I kept talking to them about how I would do the control, and half the team started thinking, ‘Okay, maybe.’ They showed the video at Shoshinaki whtout saying what the game was, and everyone who saw it was like, ‘Awesome!’
I was at Rare a couple of weeks later, and they said, ‘Let’s work on that first-person shooter prototye-y thing.’ I immediately said, ‘Okay, can we do four-player multiplayer split-screen?’ They again said, ‘No. No time. Are you kidding? The N64… Are you crazy? It’s 160×120 (pixels) per player. 320×240 screen. This is why it won’t work. That’s why it won’t work.'”
On how the Klobb came to be named after him...
“I was working super hard, whether I was there or back at Nintendo. I took a luxurious weekend off as that game was about four weeks from done to go visit my in-laws in Portland. I called [Rare] on Saturday morning to talk to Martin. He said, ‘We’ve got bad news and good news.’
We’re weeks from launch. The game has to be done. I’m like, ‘okay, what do you mean? Please tell me.’ They received a letter from Nintendo legal, saying the name of the Spyder had to be changed. It was a gun. If you have one of the first 600,000 or 700,000 copies of GoldenEye, your manual doesn’t say Klobb, it says Spyder. We already printed those manuals, and didn’t know Spyder was the name of an actual paintball gun. They didn’t want to risk it. It obviously looks nothing like this gun, but it’s a name that’s trademarked, so they wanted to change it, but didn’t have time to do a worldwide search. The name had to be unique. So Martin said, ‘We named it after you!’ The people at Rare called me Klobb. ‘So, we named it after you, is that okay?’ I was honored. And little did I know that the game was going to do great. I had no idea it was going to be what it was. The little letter from legal ended up having a nice impact on me, personally. It was appreciated.”