Few imagined the cultural phenomenon that Mission: Impossible would become after its release in 1996. The film directed by Brian De Palma established Tom Cruise as an icon of action movies, as well as giving us such mythical scenes as the robbery in the laser room.
It’s been 27 years and Mission: Impossible shows no signs of fatigue. Ethan Hunt and company add another success for the saga with “Deadly Sentence”, a great feat considering the state of the industry after the pandemic. However, not everything was going to be joyful. The franchise has also failed in other fields, such as video games.
In an era where every premiere was accompanied by its consequent video game, Mission: Impossible was not going to be less. Although M:I has several titles, today we will focus on the worst rated of them all, the Mission: Impossible for Nintendo 64.
Many games based on movies have passed without glory, with the exception of the occasional blockbuster. In 1997 we had one of them, the mythical GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64, released two years after the release of the James Bond movie. Delays were (and are) the daily bread in the videogame world and GoldenEye 007 was no exception. Something similar would happen with the eponymous Mission: Impossible game, which was excessively “inspired” by GoldenEye, even to be delayed.
The British company Ocean was in charge of bringing the world of M:I to consoles. Ocean was known for launching the typical movie games that were so popular in the 90s, which made it the ideal place for this development.
The Mission: Impossible video game was cemented to run on computers, along with some pretty demanding technical requirements even for the time. However, Paramount later signed an agreement with Nintendo to make Mission: Impossible exclusive to Nintendo 64. This meant that the team had to break their heads to get the Nintendo console to run the game.
As if this change was not enough, Ocean was bought by Infogrames in 1997. The inevitable delay suffered by the game due to the change of console was added to the change of development team. The project fell into the hands of a studio located in Lyon and they had to battle on two major fronts: to fix the technical mess as best they could and to release the game as soon as possible.
The great pressure to finish the title made the game suffer in the graphics and, above all, in the gameplay. The first Mission: Impossible project had tank controls (like Dino Crisis, Signalis or Resident Evil). However, its new focus on action changed this completely. The end result was, basically, a copy without substance of GoldenEye 007, but with Ethan Hunt as the main character. Have you ever played Mission: Impossible on Nintendo 64?
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