ON HER MAJESTY’S MO-CAP SERVICE
DUNCAN BOTWOOD ON FALLING OVER A LOT
“I often say, ‘I died a thousand times for Goldeneye 007’,” says Duncan Botwood, whose dedication to making the game the best it could be involved physical as well as mental strength. On top of his role as game designer, shaping mission structure as well as the layout of levels, he became the reference model for the various agonising reactions when enemies took a hit. “Motion Capture data was good at picking up very human movements like flinching, and you could easily tell the difference between me throwing myself on the floor versus me being pushed to the floor. So I had to stand in position with my eyes shut so I didn’t flinch, and B [Jones] would walk quietly up to me and shove me hard to make me fall over.
Multiply that by eight per position because of covering all the angles and you get a full coverage of animations… and bruises.”
Duncan, who stayed at Rare until the end of the Noughties and now works for
Ubisoft in Canada, assures us it was worth the pain. “I’m sure Goldeneye has opened doors for me, though my favourite part has been people coming up to me at work saying they played it at college with their friends, or at home with their family, and loved it. It’s great to know that people had such a positive experience and I never tire of hearing it.”
He also mentions he specifically designed the Egyptian temple to have high ceilings because he liked using the grenade launcher trajectories to bounce grenades off the top of doors he was running through to take out people chasing him. Now there’s a tip for your next deathmatch, folks!