The list of James Bond video games is long, but the list of ones people actually love is shockingly short. While 007 fans can argue until the end of time about which of the 25 official (and two unofficial) movies is the best, the conversation about Bond games generally begins and ends with GoldenEye, Rare’s 1997 N64 game that transformed the industry’s approach to first-person shooters. But the Bond game that immediately followed GoldenEye wasn’t on the N64, wasn’t in first-person, and didn’t even have a multiplayer mode. Twenty-five years ago, on November 16, 1999, Tomorrow Never Dies was released on PlayStation and nearly murdered Bond games.
The fact that GoldenEye was based on the 1995 Pierce Brosnan-led Bond movie of the same name was only tangentially related to its huge success. If you were a teenager caught up in the craze who could name the movies Oddjob and Baron Samedi had appeared in, you were in the minority. GoldenEye worked for many reasons, but one was that, even though the game paid homage to Bond’s history, players didn’t need to know anything about the franchise to enjoy it. The developers of Tomorrow Never Dies completely ignored this lesson.
