Concept Art & Sketches

These are very rough concepts for the screens that come before loading into a level. It's hard to make out, but the top one, the file select, labels the saves with "Brosnan", "Connery", "Moore", and "Dalton." This comes from the cut All Bonds feature.

The next box would become the game mode select screen. This has far more options than the final game which has three at most (1. Select Mission, 2. Multiplayer, 3. Cheat Options). The options outlined here are:

1. Options — If this refers to difficulty options, it was moved to after you select a level. If it refers to the other various options, those ended up only in the Pause Menu.
2. Play — This became "1. Select Mission."
3. Armory — There was going to be a firing range, but it didn't make the final cut.
4. Training — The final game really has no training. You're just sent straight into Dam. Perfect Dark, the spiritual successor to GoldenEye, did introduce training lessons in the Carrington Institute.
5. Multiplayer — Of course this one did make into the game, but the number of players is selected in the multiplayer options screen.
6. Virtua Cop — Even after GoldenEye was taken off rails the developers still considered adding a rail shooter mode like Virtua Cop. TODO: Source this. If this mode had been made the name for it would certainly have been changed.
7. Dirty Harry — I have no idea. The developers have never mentioned this as far as I'm aware. Would it have been some mode that used the Cougar Magnum?
8. Instructions — Perhaps an in-game version of information from the printed Instruction Booklet?
9. Cheat 1, Cheat 2 — The developers were able to fit all the cheats onto one screen in the final game.

The third box became the level select screen. I can make out "Dam" and "Gas Plant" (Facility), but what does the first word say?

This is a concept sketch for the file select menu. The date of February 28, 1997 on the sketch shows the menus, or "front end" as the developers called it, were added in the later part of development. The final menu actually ended up pretty close to the sketch, just with some elements such as the "Select File" text moved to the bottom. We also see the progress text was moved on top of the folders and the folders were stacked in pairs. These changes were probably prompted by the N64's limited resolution.

This is a far more detailed concept for the game mode selection screen than what we saw above in the preplay sketch. We can see an option called "Field Practise" scratched out, and "Training/Armory/Shooting Range" consolidated into one option. But what the heck is "Aluminum SOX"?

Here is the concept for the level select screen with the film strip theme. This is actually pretty close to what we got. The most interesting change is that the concept has seven columns of three rows each which would give 21 total levels. The final has five columns of four rows which is 20 levels. Could this extra spot have been for the cut level Perimeter? Or even a third bonus level we're not aware of? Then again "5x4" seems to be faintly written on the bottom left so maybe this 7x3 layout means nothing at all.

Another observation is that below the screen drawing it looks like the developers were thinking about using the B and A buttons to select the difficulty. Maybe this method would have been too hard to communicate on this screen. In the released game the difficulty selection is given its own screen.

This is a sketch of Goldeneye's gameplay loop. A gameplay loop is the repeating cycle of actions that define the game's core. For GoldenEye that means the level briefing, intro camera, playing/pausing, and dying or completing the level.

The first three steps are the same as the final game. Where this sketch diverges from the completed game is when the player dies. The original idea was that the player would be shown an obituary and a star representing them would be added to the memorial wall at MI6. Then the credits would play. This branch was dropped in favor of the much simpler unified debriefing screen that reads "Mission Status: KILLED IN ACTION" if the player dies.

This seems to be a concept for a screen that would show the player all levels and which difficulties those levels had been completed on. The final game has nothing like this. You have to go into the difficulty selection screen of each individual level to see which difficulties have been completed, and you see the completions only for that one level. A screen like this could have been nice, but the game is fine without it.