Prerelease Cradle

Cradle was the setting for the movie's climax so naturally it was planned to be in GoldenEye 007 from the beginning. In fact the design document had it as two separate levels — one for the catwalks and another for the showdown with Trevelyan on the small platform at the bottom of the antenna. It would have been pretty difficult to make a whole level out of the latter, so it is not surprising these two levels were combined into the one we call Cradle. There may be one remnant of the catwalks level left in the final game, a setup file called "UsetupcatZ.set." That setup file ended up being reused for Citadel.

NGC Magazine issue #60 from November 2001 ran an article on the making of GoldenEye. Curiously, all the screenshots in that article appear to be from the final game except for these from Cradle. The level itself shows no changes but Bond is wearing his navy suit rather than his green tactical outfit. I cannot entirely rule out this is a GameShark hack, but I think there is a good chance these are genuine prerelease screenshots. The navy suit was the default for Bond before levels were set up to give him other outfits.

Assuming these are genuine prerelease screenshots I am not surprised the level looks virtually identical to final. The developers probably did not have a lot of time to iterate on Cradle. There isn't a lot of room to add more detail anyway. The Nintendo 64 struggles to render Cradle as it is.

Cradle is one of the few levels to have no unused presets at all. That reinforces my belief that the stage was created quickly and did not go through much iteration.

A keen-eyed reader noticed the suit cuff and asked about it in NGC Magazine issue #63. The magazine explained, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that Rare had a beta GoldenEye cartridge. Was that true? Did these prerelease Cradle screenshots come from that? We do not know.

A promotional video shows the countdown timer at just over one minute as the player arrives at the end of the first catwalk. In the final game you are given three minutes to destroy the control console. It is possible the player just waited a couple minutes before getting to this point, but I do wonder if the timer used to be shorter.

Another shot from the same video shows the intro swirl camera starting from a different point, Bond facing a different direction, and a slightly different start position. This was surely always meant to be temporary before the intro block was properly set up.

The mission briefing picture shows no changes from the final game.