Martin Hollis

Martin Hollis is a former British video game designer best known for his work at Rare and directing and producing the critically acclaimed Nintendo 64 first-person shooter video game GoldenEye 007, released in 1997. In 2000, he left Rare to found Zoonami, a defunct video game development company that was based in Cambridge and closed in 2010. His final release was Bonsai Barber in 2009. Early life Martin Hollis grew up playing BBC Micro video games such as Chuckie Egg and Elite. He also used to develop his own games for the system, including a Pac-Man clone and a similar Easter-themed one "with rabbits going around the maze." Before turning 16, he ended up creating between 20 and 40 BBC Micro games, some of which were published in magazines. Career Martin Hollis studied computer science at the University of Cambridge. He first worked in a small engineering company for a year, developing tools for tracking boats and submarines. In December 1993, when he was 22 years old, he applied for a job at Rare and became the company's first computer science graduate. Due to his knowledge of Unix, he was tasked with setting up the networks of the expensive Silicon Graphics systems Rare had recently acquired at the time. He then worked as a second programmer on the coin-op version of Killer Instinct with Rare's technical director Chris Stamper, who designed the hardware. Hollis programmed the machine's operating system. Both Stamper and Hollis also went to Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, California, where they got the chance to write and test code that would run on the first chips of the then-upcoming Nintendo 64 console. After his work on Killer Instinct, Hollis was interested in leading a team to produce a Nintendo 64 video game based on the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, an idea that had been proposed to Rare at the highest level. The resulting game, GoldenEye 007, was inspired by Virtua Cop and released in 1997 to considerable critical and commercial success. Hollis remarked that he worked non-stop on the game, "[averaging] an 80 hour week over the 2 and a half years of the project", and that the team he recruited was very talented and dedicated even though most of it was composed of people who had never worked on video games. GoldenEye 007 designer Duncan Botwood described both Hollis and programmer Mark Edmonds, who created the GoldenEye 007 engine, as some of the smartest people he has ever known.