10 Great Video Games That Almost Never Happened At All

7. Goldeneye 007

Originally intended as a side-scrolling platformer following the monster success of Rare's magnum opus Donkey Kong Country, the mack daddy of console first person shooters would have been a very different game if Nintendo had got their way. Consisting of one of the most inexperienced development teams to ever work with a major license, 8 out of 10 of Goldeneye's developers had never worked on a single game before, but what would have been a disaster for most, ended up being the driving force behind one of the most influential titles of all time. Goldeneye played like nothing ever made, because their team had never made anything before. Most surprisingly, they never wanted the film license in the first place: according to developer Karl Milton, tie-ins with major franchises had a bad reputation, following poor releases such as 2D side-scrollers Robocop and Batman - or in other words, exactly the kind Nintendo wanted Rare to make. Luckily for us, Rare stuck with the license and to their guns. Despite moving from the SNES to the N64, changing from a platformer to on-rails shooter to FPS, they managed to continually stumbled forward towards genius. Oh, and they chucked in a multiplayer mode that defined the genre and state of multiplayer gaming as we know it. Not bad for a first try.