Zoonami CEO and founder Martin Hollis at the 2008 Game Developers Conference 2008 

One of the great things about the Game Developers Conference is that you never know who you'll run into. As we hung around the conference room following Dylan Cuthbert's illuminating talk about the methodology behind his PixelJunk series of games for Playstation Network, we spotted none other than Martin Hollis, director and producer of the classic Nintendo 64 shooter GoldenEye 007. Hollis, who after leaving Rare went on to found a new development studio named Zoonami, was kind enough to chat with us for a few moments. We asked him what he thought of the current state of videogames, and he replied that the last three-quarters of 2007 and early 2008 represented a Golden Age of gaming, led by BioShock and Portal. Prior to that, the pioneer of great console first-person shooters confessed that he'd been suffering from FPS burnout.

After that bit of small talk, we went in for the kill: what was Hollis himself up to next? Because while the smaller, more casual games that Zoonami has been developing are all well and good--Zendoku, Go! Puzzle and the as-yet-unreleased Funkydilla--what GoldenEye and Perfect Dark fans really want to know is if he'll ever swing for the fences again. Smiling, he said that 2007's bumper crop had reawakened his interest in making games that require big teams. But he added that we should not take that statement to mean that he was in fact working on a big team game. Nor could he tell us what he was working on. Could he, we wondered, tell us when he'd be able to tell us what he was working on? He thought about it for a second, then said that even if he knew when he could tell us what he was working on, he wouldn't be able to tell me that either. Faced with Hollis' unyielding secrecy, we gave up and said, "It seems as though you're going back to your 00 roots." At that, he laughed, and our entertaining but fruitless conversation came to a close.