In 1985, when he was 14 years old, the game designer Martin Hollis asked his mother to help him write a letter to the estate of the author AA Milne. The teenager wanted to make a video game featuring Milne’s most famous character, the honey-addict bear Winnie-the-Pooh. To date, Hollis had written only a few games on the BBC Micro in his bedroom: festive-themed clones of popular arcade titles that swapped, say, the Easter bunny for Pac-Man, or Santa Claus for Space Invaders. A PC magazine had paid Hollis £40 to publish the source code to one of his Christmas-themed games, which readers could type out and play. A game featuring Winnie-the-Pooh, Hollis reasoned, could be a lucrative hit. A few weeks later he received a letter from Milne’s estate, provisionally offering him the video game rights to Winnie-the-Pooh for a minimum of £50,000. “It was out of our league at that point in time,” he says.
Twelve years later, Hollis released GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64, a video game based on the James Bond film. There was little fanfare: Bond, like Winnie-the-Pooh, was a household name, but licensed games were viewed as the lowest form of a medium already widely considered to be profligate. Most movie “tie-ins”, as they were disparagingly called, were made to a punishing schedule to ensure they launched alongside the film. Their developers typically worked blind, limited by the narrative constraints of scripts that were unfinished and rarely suited to interactive treatment.
