Prerelease Dam

1. Drawing #1

We are very lucky that some years ago developer Duncan Botwood posted his plans for Dam on Twitter/X. In broad strokes the plan looks pretty similar to what the level became. There are three guard towers along the dam, docks behind the dam, and extra areas to expand the level beyond what was seen in the movie. Even the manhole covers along the dam are jotted down here.

What's missing from these plans is also interesting. The area where the player starts in the final game and the vehicle tunnel are not planned here. I also can't quite tell if the tunnels beneath the dam were under consideration yet.

One of the most interesting details is this little boat drawing next to the dock. It shows that the developers were thinking about the boat idea from an early stage, even though the boat was ultimately dropped. We'll discuss the boat more farther down the page.

2. Commandant's Building

The building housing the Russian Commandant was also present in the plan. This building may have been inspired by a deleted scene from the start of the movie. In this scene Bond stealthily activates a button to open a gate. The final cut just begins with Bond running through the gate and doesn't explain how it opens. Nevertheless we know the developers visited the movie sets several times so perhaps they drew inspiration from this guard building.

If you look closely at the top left of the building in the deleted scene you can see an alarm. Indeed the game's version of this building has an alarm as well. Not included in the plan is that large wall on the left in the game screenshot. I suspect that was added later in an effort to block visibility and improve Dam's frame rate.

3. Drawing #2

These are Duncan Botwood's notes for enemy behavior in Dam's starting area. It is interesting that the start point is marked as being right about here. The developers must have decided Dam was too short and expanded it.

The gist of these notes is that Bond's start location would not be safe. The player would either be spotted when the truck moved or when the guard patrolling the tower saw Bond. The final game is much more forgiving and provides the player with a safe place to stand at the start.

This concept is missing the pillbox as well as several other guards who were added in the final game. It shows that the GoldenEye developers created plans, but were not afraid to make changes as the project evolved.

It also looks like there's more notes beneath this one. I hope we can see those one day!

1. Finding Answers

Every player who has noticed Dam's island has wondered, "Why does this exist?" It does seem strange for the developers to take the time to create the space then never utilize it. Let's look at Rare's official answer and then the developers' explanations.

This is Rare's official comment on the island from their 1998 website:

A: It was originally planned for Bond to have to go across to the island to complete an objective. It didn't go into the final version of the game, and the graphics are all that remains. But don't they look interesting?

— GoldenEye Rumour Mill (Source)

It's definitely an interesting answer although it does raise more questions such as what the objective would have been. Developers Mark Edmonds and Duncan Botwood gave more detailed explanations in an interview with the defunct website MundoRare. MundoRare asked, "Tell us about the mission objective originally planned for the famous distant island in the Dam level, and why you kept it out of the final game."

There was talk about being able to drive a boat there, but we never got around to implementing the boat… Development was very freeform and unplanned back then – some things made it in and some didn’t. We really were working out how to do everything as we went along.

— Mark Edmonds (Source)

There was no real objective as such – if I did it today I’d probably have a control for an open water outlet pipe that was blocking Bond’s bungie jump there, so you’d have to go there to turn off the water. I think the original plan was to have a building over there to go and investigate, with armour as a reward. That would have meant a boat ride needed to be coded in, and some of the scenery had gaps in when viewed from the island, so it was too much work. The Dam was one of the more technically difficult levels to get working – Martin ended up hard-coding the chunks of background into the game to get it to turn off scenery correctly and it took him ages!

— Duncan Botwood (Source)

We have a contradiction where Rare says the island had an objective while Botwood says there was no objective. I don't think anyone is lying, it's just that, like Edmonds said, development was very free-form. There may have been conversations about putting an objective there and there may have been other conversations about making the island an optional side quest of sorts.

2. Further Investigation

Just how far did the developers get with implementing the trip to the island?

Amazingly, the game actually has an unused speedboat model. This boat with the red stars feels like a perfect fit for this level set in the Soviet Union. We're pretty confident that this model was intended for Dam's boat ride.

It doesn't stop with the boat model. There is an unused pad exactly where Botwood placed the boat in the original plans! The pad is seen as a tiny blue cube in this view from the GoldenEye Setup Editor. The above screenshot shows how the boat would look if placed at this pad. Note: I did scale up the model because it is fairly small.

A look at the island in the Setup Editor shows some setup work was done, although it is very incomplete. Clipping is shown here as the white rectangle. It covers only a part of the island and none of the guard tower. This means the player and any other characters are confined to that white rectangle without modding the stage. There are some presets around the tower which could have acted as a path for guards.

The ladder does have clipping, but I'm pretty sure that was auto generated based on the ladder's texture.

You can see that this guard tower's design is very simple compared to the other towers. I do wonder if there was a time when all of Dam's guard towers looked similar to this one.

The most interesting setup relic on the island is this unused preset (2759) on the tower's wall. Its preset number comes between other presets used as alarms. That strongly suggests this preset was intended to be an alarm. If so that may explain which objective was meant for the island: neutralize all alarms.

There is one lingering mystery — what was that massive drone gun meant for? One theory is that the player would have had to destroy it so it wouldn't shoot down Bond's plane when he escaped two levels later on Runway. It does sound like a plausible theory, although I don't know of any evidence to support it.

Q's Briefing

The GoldenEye movie begins with a captivating scene where Bond bungee jumps off an enormous dam. As Bond descends he pulls out a piton gun — basically a device that shoots out a small grappling hook — and then shoots that hook into a platform at the bottom of the dam. Once the grappling hook takes hold Bond reels himself in. The developers of GoldenEye the game seem to have had some ideas to recreate that scene.

In the final release Dam ends with the player simply stepping off the dam's central platform. You can see in the outro scene that there is no bungee cord, though to be fair this was far less apparent on original Nintendo 64 hardware.

The first evidence for a more complex jump is from Q's portion of the mission briefing:

"Information concerning shipping and contacts is stored on a computer system in a secret ops room within the dam. With this covert modem connected to their satellite link we can intercept the data when a backup is carried out. As for getting down the dam, use the bungee rope. At the bottom of the jump, use the piton gun. Simple."

The bit about the bungee rope and piton gun is strange since neither are anywhere to be found in the level.

Unused Items

Incredibly both these items actually do exist in the game's code. They are both unfinished and use the Grenade as a placeholder model.

The Bungee item has no functionality, but the Piton Gun acts like a single shot Grenade Launcher. It even has its own ammo type. In this video the game was modded to give Bond both items.

GoldenEye's text file LpropobjE.lng also contains the unused string "a piton gun." which could hint that the player was intended to collect it. Still, we cannot say for sure if Bond would have been given these items or would have had to collect them. The developers themselves may not have gotten that far when it came to their plans for these.

The Bottom Platform

There is one more major piece to this puzzle and that's the platform at the very bottom of the dam. This is where Bond lands in the movie and the game developers faithfully recreated it, even putting a metal hatch in the middle. In this screenshot the game has been modded so the intro camera gives a close look at the platform.

And in this screenshot the game has been further modded to disable the fade out and outro so we can stand on the platform. The dam's face does have collision tiles from the top all the way to the bottom so one can simply jump down here. There is also one unused pad down here, 016E. This pad happens to be the highest number in Dam, perhaps meaning it would added last.

That's not all! If the hatch is removed you can see there is a shaft beneath it. I wouldn't say it goes down that deep, as you can see from the bullet holes I made, but there's probably enough room for a character to fit in if they crouched. To be clear, the hatch cover is part of the level background, not a destructible object. The game had to be modded again to remove it.

More Tidbits

Perfect Dark, the spiritual successor to GoldenEye, happens to contain an early version of Dam's mission briefing. It can be found in the file mp_setupdam.c in the Perfect Dark PC Port project. Take a look at M's briefing:

And also compare Q's early and final briefings:

In the early briefing M does mention a bungee jump, but not the piton gun. Q says nothing about either. Q's advice about the bungee rope and piton gun is only added to the final briefing. Thus it would seem the plans for the bungee cord and piton gun were made after the early briefing was written.

Finally, take a look at the game's instruction booklet. Bungee Equipment is listed as the very first gadget despite absent from Dam.

Conclusion

We've gone through all the information we have about Dam's bungee jump, but what does it all mean? I believe the developers had conversations about implementing a complex bungee jump that would have closely matched the movie scene. The fact that the bungee cord and piton gun were made inventory items strongly suggests the player would have been required to collect them and/or to use them. It's even possible collecting them could have been an objective.

The bungee jump could have gone down three ways. It could have been completely automatic and in first person. Perhaps the player would use the bungee equipment at the top platform then the game would take control. The player would be moved off the platform, fall down the dam, pull out the piton gun, grapple the bottom platform, land, cut open the hatch with the piton gun's attached laser, and finally jump down the hatch where the level would fade out. That would have been a heck of a lot of work to script in.

The second option would be having the player do all those steps themselves. But imagine all the variables involved. As the player was falling they would have to aim the piton gun at the right place and shoot at the right time. That's a lot to ask, especially on the first level!

The third option would be to do it all as a third person outro scene — basically a recreation of the movie scene. Such a cinema would have been the most complex in the game by an order of magnitude.

No matter how you cut it, there's just no way to pull off such a complicated sequence without an absurd amount of work. Remember that the developers had much more essential matters to attend to than the bungee jump. That's why the whole idea was dropped. The fact that bungee equipment did make it into the instruction booklet does mean the idea was probably abandoned pretty late in development.