Making Matt and Jay kiss in the nirvana the band the show (the) GoldenEye 007 RomHack
One thing Nirvanna the Band the Show does really well is parody stuff, they go all out with them. For episode two of season two, they parodied GoldenEye 007, with their intro sequence being the same as the game’s and they did that by modding the game and adding the main characters of the show, Matt and Jay, to the game.
Luca Tarantini shared the process as well as the modded ROM on his website, and you can download and play the modded version yourself, which is awesome!
One thing that Luca points out is this:
Jay replaces Bond, and Matt replaces Natalya. So by default you can play the campaign as Jay with some missions featuring Matt. Does this mean they share a kiss at the end of the game? I... I think so.
I’ve been aware of this mod existing for probably a year, and I kinda always wondered if GoldenEye would be the second instance of a kiss between Matt and Jay (The Book being the first, of course). I happened to be stressed out over some non-serious stuff one day, I remembered the mod existed and decided to try it out as a distraction. It sounded simple, y’know, can’t believe no one tried it before, I thought, little did I know the rabbit hole I was getting myself into.
So this is retelling about how me, a curious individual, with wrist issues and too much free time, that has never played GoldenEye or messed with their modding tools before, decided to play this game, learn how to beat it and how to mod it just so could see my two favourite beautiful-faced Canadian boys kiss. Enjoy.
[I'm working on finishing a cut and dry tutorial on how to mess with the game yourself. But I uploaded my modified ROMs if you're interested in just playing it yourself.]
So, first step, beat the game, watch the cutscene.
A good thing about the ROM is that you don’t need to play the whole game, all the levels are unlocked already so you can just select the final level – I did went into this fully prepared to beat the whole game.I didn’t know GoldenEye had two extra bonus levels after the final proper story level, so I wasted some time aimlessly running around Egyptian ruins until I decided to check out a walkthrough, which proved extremely valuable for this whole endeavour. I learned the level I actually wanted to play was called Cradle, so I went to try beat it and... I have to say, as someone that doesn’t play first person shooters, much less old ones, this game was hard, especially playing on the keyboard. It’s incredibly hard, in fact, I don’t even think it’s possible, to aim, and the most challenging part of this level is that you enter a bunker with a console you need to destroy to stop a bomb or something and there’s two machine guns shooting hard at you and to kill them you need to shoot them, except Jay Bond won’t aim at them so you gotta do it manually, which I really tried to do, but, by the time I had my aim set on it, I was already dead.
I tried turning the game cheats on – after wasting some time trying to use the gameshark codes – and did beat the game like that, but the final cutscene wouldn’t play, so that was a waste (I did worry that maybe the modded models had somehow glitched the game – I know fan translated games at least can run into that issue –, but it was just the cheats skipping it, thankfully). I watched a few gameplays of that level and I tried to figure out how to input cheats in-level, but GoldenEye has really long cheat codes and it was hard translating the N64 control scheme onto keyboard keys, so it didn’t work.
Invincibility: R+Left, L+Down, Left, Up, Down, R+C-Left, L+C-Left, L+R+Left, L+R+Right, L+C-Left
Eventually, I had to settle to just getting good by making extensive use of the save states feature. Any amount of progress I could make, save state. And I used different save slots too, cuz I’m not that much of a fool. (reloading save states sometimes made the enemy NPCs glitch out and become invisible, which wasn’t good). And I gave up on aiming, it was just holding me back. Also, for a long time I didn’t know I could switch to the new weapons I automatically looted from the corpses of my enemies by pressing a button, so I just used my shitty basic gun that did little damage, I don’t know how I learned to change weapons, but it was a huge game changer.
I would play a few hours spread across the day everyday, until I did it and... well... even though Matt does replace Natalya in the opening film (and in the multiplayer, I assume, I didn't check it), he doesn’t actually replace her in the actual story mode, so after going through the trouble of beating the final level you just get to see Jay kiss a girl... nothing wrong with that, but, for the reason we’re here, that was a very tragic moment and certainly not helping improve society.
What I later learned, thanks to my trustworthy walkthrough, is that you can go to the missions “Jungle” and the second “Bunker” level and see that the Natalya model is still in the game in the opening cutscene, which, if I had known previously, maybe would’ve saved me a lot of pain, but, in a way, would’ve meant I probably would have given up on the game without even playing it for real. Instead, at this point, I had already sunk so much time and energy into this that I was committed to seeing it through, so I sank deeper.
But to answer Luca’s question: No, Jay doesn’t kiss Matt at the end of the game, but don’t you worry, I’ll fix it and restore the original vision.
Next step, putting Matt in the main game.
So now, I gotta mess with the models first. Thankfully, Luca also lists the software they used to mod the game, the GoldenEye Setup Editor, which is mainly why I didn’t give up when I did, there was a whole path to take right in front of me. So, I innocently thought, just a matter of downloading it and changing the models. Fool!
By the way, I downloaded an emulator (Get the windows 64 zip) to play the ROM on there. I had to map all the keys myself, so I changed the control scheme so I could play it mostly one-handed, with minimal finger travel, it was easy to switch hands too if one got too tired and it’s just more comfortable to me. This made me realize that playing emulated games in a emulator is a great way to make your own accessibility.
Full disclosure, everything I say from here on out is what I understood of how the game and the modding tool work. I couldn’t find much information on how to use the editor either, so the following was all through me messing around by myself until things worked. If you happen to be a GoldenEye hacker, share your knowledge, make a full nirvana the band the show the mod, put Vince Valence in the game and stuff.
Alright, so, first, I download the ROM and the tool, it took some poking around to find stuff in the editor, but I manage to load the ROM onto the tool, and go to the model editor page. I have to go through every single model to find where the fuck the Matt model is, time-consuming but not hard. I find it, it’s split into two parts, head and body, I export them so I can import them on the Natalya model (after I find it as well).
The problem now is how GoldenEye deals with their character models. The majority of the GoldenEye character models are split in two parts, a head and a body, that’s how the Matt and Jay models are as well, but the main NPC character models, of which Natalya is part of, are one single head+body model, which means that if replace Natalya’s model with Matt’s head, she appears invisible in the game, if I replace it with his body, the body shows up, but in the absence of a head, the game pulls a head model from one of the preexisting models at random.
At this point, I at least had the foresight to check my walkthrough for missions where Natalya shows up at the start, so I could learn this painful information easily by just loading these levels instead of beating Cradle which saved me from some painful heartache.
I tried making use of the Matt model linked on the website as well, but the tool didn’t recognize it or something, I can't rememeber, but it didn’t work. (I'm writing this post three months after the fact, by the way)
So, since I don’t know how the GoldenEye cutscene system works – Does it set the models for the cutscene the moment you open the level, meaning if I get the wrong one I need to play the whole level again or does it set the models when the cutscene plays, meaning I can just reload my save state after I finish the level?
I didn’t dare risk it since it’s so hard and taxing for me to beat it, so I replaced the vast majority of the head models – but not all of them, I found Jared’s head model while looking for the Matt and Natalya’s models, I kept him there – with Matt’s head, to up my chances.
This took a bit of time, but it was pretty worth it to load the Bunker level and see Matt in his full pixel glory and to see him and Jay stand together at the opening of the Jungle level, it’s the kind of cool factor I felt when all the red power rangers joined together in that one Power Rangers episode.
One thing worth pointing out is that any change made to the game’s textures/models renders the previous save states unusable, so, no, I couldn’t just reload my Mission Complete save state after I made any changes, unfortunately.
Anyway, it’s now time to play through Cradle again. It was still hard, but a little less so, I had knowledge and experience now.
[narrator] But it wasn’t that simple
I take the body armour from behind me, to give me that extra layer of protection, shot the first enemy, take his gun, switch to it, shoot the next three guys, take their guns, dual wield, save state, go down into the bunker, ignore the machine guns, destroy the PC and leave that hell house – Save state – to chase down Travelyan until – save state – I finish him off and boom! Level complete. Save state. (Of course, I did die and had to reload a lot) I press continue and there it is, Jay and Matt lovingly holding each other, yes... as Jay kisses Matt... ‘s neck...
New issue: Matt is tall, Jay is short.
At this moment, I cursed the sexist tendencies in videogames of making men so extremely different to women (guys are tall and buff and girls are short and skinny) for ruining the Matt and Jay kiss. I then thought about the implications of James Bond being the same size as the women in the game, does that make him a trans guy? Or a girl even? Is GoldenEye 007 a progressive game actually?
[narrator] I didn’t care.
The lack of canonicity to the characters and the implications of the sexist design choices aside, the models have different heights, so they can’t kiss. At this point, I could’ve just stopped there. I did what I could, you can now play GoldenEye 007 with nirvana the band, that is pretty nice, and, hey, they kinda kiss, right? But that wasn’t enough, that wasn’t the vision.
I tried using different models, maybe if I changed Jay’s model to a guy one that would fix it, it didn’t, the game would always force Bond to be short, despite not making the models replacing Natalya short as well (I didn't really try to replicate it in the process of writing this, who knows, maybe I used the wrong models). The only thing that worked was replacing Matt’s body with one of the other women bodies, so that’s what I did. Which I guess is fitting since he is meant to be replacing Natalya, so of course he’s a girl, or, as I prefer to understand it, a trans guy, like Jay.
The new problem is that none of the girls are wearing Matt’s clothes textures, so the final thing to do, hopefully, is changing the textures, which was quite the painful process. I had to hop frequently between the model editor and image tool and the textures themselves are all separeted in the editor so it was hard to know what exactly I was changing or what the textures I exported/imported were. I had to open up the game every time to see how they rendered too.
There’s very few girl models to choose from, I ended up picking a model that didn’t wear a skirt, but she’s also thin, so the body to head proportion does look kinda weird. But from certain angles it looks nice.
And there we go. After lots of messing around, Jay and Matt embracing and kissing each other. Definitely better for society.
[Jay] I think that it’s actually quite nice watching that happen.
[Matt] Me too.
It’s far from perfect, all my solutions are fairly messy, and there’s definitely ways to improve this if I were familiar with proper GoldenEye 007 hacking.
In the process of replaying the game and retracing my steps to write the tutorial meant to accompany this blog post, I ended up finding a fat woman model that looks way better on Matt, but she’s wearing a long lab coat so his blazer looks weird when I change the textures – I would’ve included a kiss video with this changed model in my link with the roms, but I didn’t manage to beat the game by the time I wanted to post this post – If I knew how to model the models I might’ve tried to improve on it.
But at this point I was tired, my wrists were hurting and I had basically exhausted all my options of what to do with the very limited knowledge I had. And, you know, I got what I wanted. I got to share my efforts with my friends in the last day of pride month after we had all experienced some nasty BS at the start of the month. They enjoyed it, I was happy, it was a nice win for the gays.
I’ll repeat tho, if you know your way around GoldenEye 007 hacking or if you're a deeply curious individual like me, nirvana the band the mod, come on, you have to! Don’t involve me tho, I’m retired.
Okay, I’ve gone on enough about messing with this game, before I close this off I want to briefly talk about some meanings brought from Matt and Jay being in GoldenEye 007.
The GoldenEye 007 Themes
Thanks to a dear friend, I learned how the intertextuality in the show can lead to interesting dialogues with the parodied media. I often don’t share the media repertoire that gets parodied in the show, besides being familiar with it through cultural osmosis, so I hardly think about these relationships, but since I’m now a little bit familiar with parts of GoldenEye 007’s story, from playing the final level and reading a little of the walkthrough I can point out some things. Obviously, the ROMHack itself doesn’t have it’s own unique narrative separated from the original game’s story, and I don’t think The Boost is taking from its plot, but the way the GoldenEye characters and plot relates to the nirvana the band characters is interesting and fun to think about, so here's some loose, brief thoughts.The first obvious thing is that, by transposing Matt and Jay onto GoldenEye, you turn the best friend duo into a romantic pair, which is fun, with Jay getting to be the cool manly hero and Matt the damsel and love interest, sorta like an inverse of that one scene in The Blindside, an episode centered around Jay wanting to be the cool guy, which sorta makes GoldenEye as a fantasy scenario of sorts for him.
I like how the lines Trevelyan says during the final fight make a lot of sense for Jay’s character. He paints Bond as this selfish man, dedicated to following orders and accomplishing his mission to the point of betraying his friends. And, according to my walkthrough, “Bond trusts his life to Trevelyan.” so I like looking at these two as besties and as a tragic end of sorts to the Matt and Jay relationship.
[Trevelyan] Always loyal to the mission, never to your friends.
This line is specific also rings true for Matt's actions in The Boost. But the final line Bond says to him is the most Jay thing to me.
[Trevelyan] For England, James?
[Bond] No, for me.
In terms of the modding fuckery I had to do that goes away from the actual game, I like how almost all the enemies have Matt's face now, so Jay is just shooting at Matt to then go and kiss him at the end. He's a complex guy.
While I was checking out the textures on Matt in the jungle level, he ended up getting killed by a lone soldier that turned out to be none other than Jared. I let him kill Jay too, it felt fitting. He finally snapped after dealing with these jerks. At a different time, when I was getting the kiss footage, Jay ended up kissing Jared at the end. I didn't screenshot it, but it happened.
And, lastly, from both a fictional and real life standpoint, the fact Natalya, i.e. Matt, gets accused of betraying their countrymen is particularly funny to me. He would never!
I’m sure if I were to actually watch (I’m not playing it myself, man, sorry) the full game story, there would be a lot more of fun, silly and interesting parallels to be had, but I just wanted to point those little bits out.
The main takeaway, here, of course, is that in GoldenEye 007, Matt and Jay are trans guys, they met in prison and they’re in love. And they're short guys in this big men world.
Alright, that’s it. I spent, like, one week in June getting this mod working and I spent one week in September getting this post done. It was much harder the 2nd time, splitting time between playing/hacking the game and writing about playing/hacking the game, my wrists are dead. That's why I don't really play games much anymore, gotta pick two in between writing, subtitling and gaming. But it's done, and I'm free now.
Thank you to Luca Tarantini for not only making this RomHack, but for making it available to everyone so I could be consumed by it. I sorta make it seem like a very painful process, it was, but I did have a lot of fun messing around with the game and just playing it. And I greatly enjoy having knowledge about it.
Once again, you can download the official ROM on Luca's website and you can get my modified roms, plus see the kiss in action on my little drive. I forgot to mention it, but the kiss scene itself is fascinating, is this passionate romantic kissing set to this super cool action music, it's very boy and very girl.
Thank you for reading!
