That was their problem, they played that card for too long and raised peoples hope. The only original memeber of the GoldenEye team at FRD was Karl Hilton.

Norgate did SOME of the music along with Kirkhope.

Stephen Ellis joined fairly late and worked mostly on the multiplayer .

Doak did a lot of the AI setups/scripting on levels which as far as I recall were aleady built by Karl who ok did a great job, but Hollis and Mark Edmonds (Edmonds being the biggest unsung hero and none of you know who he is. Well almost none of you.) were also major players in the game, as were Bea Jones for doing the Mo-Cap, which was one of the games best features. Nobody knows what poor old "and Duncan" did so I shall continue that tradition!!

The basics of what made goldeneye great were in there for a VERY longtime. It just needed pulling together.

I'm not trying to discredit the team, but I'm simply saying, you can't look at FRD and think that they're going to live up to GE. Nothing will top GE ever on a console because it was so far ahead of its time and at a time when fundametal gains/mechanics/principles were ripe for picking and more importantly the public was a lot easier to please. Oh and it helped having a James Bond universe.

GE was a great game that stemmed from many factors which did not make the transition to FRD or anywhere else. It faded away with Perfect Dark 64. As did Rarewhere?

On the plus side the world no longer has to endure that bloody Rob Yescombe.

Sorry, but when you let people like that do the PR for your company and latest release you really should not scratch your head when nobody wants to support you.

Stephen Ellis is apparently setting up a new company called Pumpkin Beach.

I checked the DNS records and his domain names (pumpkinbeach.com & pumpkinbeach.co.uk) were established on the 26th August 2008, so for someone to actually purchase domain names they probably knew for sometime that the end was nigh.

I'm sure you'll see another game from them, but ironically they made the same mistake Rare did, they grew too big for their boots and when you have 185+ staff with an average salary of about 30k a year you're in deep shit if you spend 3 years making a game and it does not sell. As the old saying goes, you're only as good as your last game.