Bringing EGM’s “All Bonds” Joke To Life: A Teenage Geek Adventure

Editor’s Note: Daniel Taveras is still haunted by a former EGM April Fool’s prank where we fake-showed a way to play as all the classic Bond actors in GoldenEye 007 via a near impossible, completely maddening time trial. We managed to piss off a LOT of readers when they found out it was all a ruse.

Was haunted, we should say. After hours of dedication, Daniel finally figured out how to make it work with the help of a GameShark Pro. Check out how he did it — along with the video proof that we asked for — below. Crazy, crazy stuff. -Shoe

GoldenEye 007 was one of those life-changing things — the kind of thing where you didn’t know you needed it until it digested your soul. It was a shooter with options. Jockeying down blurry hallways with an RCP-90 and tearing up fools was almost as fun as letting an innocent scientist think I was on his side before I released a shotgun shell into his photo-rendered face.

One of the most infamous pranks in EGM’s prank history involved GoldenEye in a terrible, terrible way. It fooled me and my classmates for weeks. What made it so darn believable was the instruction manual the game came with; it clearly had screenshots of the other Bonds as playable characters.

Recently I was going through old things. Why? Because when you feel like things currently are not going the way they should be, you tend to look back instead of forward. It’s easy to be comfortable with the past, and there could be some real horror going forward. I decided to boot up my dusty Nintendo 64.

A while after the April Fool’s prank all those years ago, I was playing with my newly acquired GameShark Pro and began learning how to really get into using it. I never was into this sort of thing before but over one summer I became a game code super nerd. I swear I could see things in the code. I was like Neo but it was before I had ever seen the Matrix so that reference means nothing to the past me. I used what knowledge I had from other similar Gameshark hacks and went systematically line by line through the code until I knew what everything meant. Once I had learned enough, I tried recreating the famous “All Bonds” (video of it in action below)….

Here’s a screen of the GameShark menu:

The first page of code…it goes much longer than this:

This screen shows the level of my young insanity. I made “All Bonds” on the list of cheats in the cheat menu. Turning “on” the cheat does nothing — it’s purely cosmetic and just looks cool and official.

The developers left the portraits of the different actors that have played Bond hidden in the game’s code. After finding them all, I put them in different spaces and named them all. The uber-hilarious part was that the character’s portrait slot placement was linked to their in-game sounds so Sean Connery (who takes up Natalya’s slot) screams like a woman when shot. I’ve actually heard that this is a very accurate representation of the real man, but having never met him, I can’t say.

Through all my searching I could never find the faces (or clothing) of the various former Bonds. They were probably taken out of the game. What I did was use faces that looked kinda like the actors and put them in suits. From top left, clockwise: Dalton, Moore, Brosnan, Connery.

Here is video proof of it all:

I consider this one of my greatest feats in video-geekdom. There’s just some pure coolness knowing that, at anytime, I can play what EGM dangled in front of me all those years ago.

A deathmatch between all these men in real life would net a pretty penny on pay-per-view. Thank goodness I can enact it in my home…right now.