Boss Fight Books will return.
The publisher isn’t quite ready to unveil the titles from the sixth season of their long-running series, but we did recently get our first look at an upcoming one-off… GoldenEye 007 by Alyse Knorr.
Boss Fight Books is currently seeking funding for GoldenEye 007 through Kickstarter, though they’ve already surpassed their initial goal at the time of this writing. Similar in structure to the books for NBA Jam and Shovel Knight before it, this entry in the series will explore the full scope of GoldenEye 007‘s creation through extensive interviews with the development team at Rare, as well as additional commentary from experts and fans:
Bond—James Bond. In the 80s and 90s, the debonair superspy’s games failed to live up to the giddy thrills of his films. That all changed when British studio Rare unleashed GoldenEye 007 in 1997. In basements and college dorms across the world, friends bumped shoulders while shooting, knifing, exploding, and slapping each other’s digital faces in the Nintendo 64 game that would redefine the modern first-person shooter genre and become the most badass party game of its generation.
But GoldenEye’s success was far from a sure thing. For years of development, GoldenEye’s team of rookie developers were shooting in the dark with no sense of what the N64 or its controller would be like, and the game’s relentless violence horrified higher-ups at squeaky clean Nintendo. As development lagged far behind the debut of the tie-in film GoldenEye, the game nearly came out an entire Bond movie too late.
Through extensive interviews with GoldenEye’s creators, writer and scholar Alyse Knorr traces the story of how this unlikely licensed game reinvigorated a franchise and a genre. Learn all the stories behind how this iconic title was developed, and why GoldenEye 007 has continued to kick the living daylights out of every other Bond game since.
In a first for the publisher, GoldenEye 007 will be released as an ebook, a paperback, and a deluxe hardcover. The deluxe hardcover will include a redesigned cover, an extra chapter about the game’s sound effects and music, and additional pages dedicated to design documents and photos from the developers.
The ebook edition of GoldenEye 007 will be available in July 2022, shortly after the conclusion of the Kickstarter campaign. Paperback copies will follow in September and the deluxe hardcover edition will arrive in December.
UPDATE (7/7/22): Ars Technica has published an excerpt from GoldenEye 007 that focuses on the game design philosophy of the development team and the unlikely inspiration for the objective-based missions.