From 1994 to 2001, Ken Lobb was an executive working at Nintendo of America and had a hand in developing many games the company, including the N64’s GoldenEye 007 and Killer Instinct. In a new interview with Game Informer, Lobb sat down to talk a bit about his involvement with GoldenEye 007 and the game’s origins.
While recalling working with Rare at the time, Lobb noted that Goldeneye 007 was basically developed inside a barn converted into working areas by Rare and referred to as the “Manor Farmhouse.” Lobb explained the reasoning for this with the following:
“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…”
To read more from the interview with Ken Lobb, you can go here.
