Nintendo worried its classic game GoldenEye was too violent


Violent video games make you more violent, unless they totally don't. But either way, Nintendo has apparently been concerned about how on-screen bloodshed comes across at least since the glory days of their beloved N64 console.
The company had worried that its James Bond game GoldenEye 007 would be too violent, The Guardian reports director Martin Hollis said at the GameCity festival in Nottingham, England. Here's how he described the feeback on the first-person shooter game from Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto:
One point was that there was too much close-up killing — he found it a bit too horrible. I don't think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital. [The Guardian]
Hollis didn't implement the handshake idea, but he did add a credits sequence before its 1997 release to really hit home the idea that the characters were fictional.
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If nothing else, a good take away from this revelation is that it might be time to dust off your personal nostalgia factory and fire up GoldenEye. Just don't bother blowing on the cartridge first.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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