Martin Hollis studied
computer science at the
University of Cambridge. He first worked in a small engineering company for a year, developing tools for tracking boats and submarines. In December 1993, when he was 22 years old, he applied for a job at
Rare and became the company's first computer science graduate. Due to his knowledge of
Unix, he was tasked with setting up the networks of the expensive
Silicon Graphics systems Rare had recently acquired at the time. He then worked as a second programmer on the
coin-op version of
Killer Instinct with Rare's technical director
Chris Stamper, who designed the hardware. Hollis programmed the machine's
operating system. Both Stamper and Hollis also went to Silicon Graphics in
Mountain View, California, where they got the chance to write and test code that would run on the first chips of the then-upcoming
Nintendo 64 console. . From left to right:
Aleks Krotoski,
David Braben, Martin Hollis,
Alice Taylor. After his work on
Killer Instinct, Hollis was interested in leading a team to produce a Nintendo 64 video game based on the 1995
James Bond film
GoldenEye, an idea that had been proposed to Rare at the highest level. The resulting game,
GoldenEye 007, was inspired by
Virtua Cop and released in 1997 to considerable critical and commercial success. Hollis remarked that he worked non-stop on the game, "[averaging] an 80 hour week over the 2 and a half years of the project", and that the team he recruited was very talented and dedicated even though most of it was composed of people who had never worked on video games.
GoldenEye 007 designer
Duncan Botwood described both Hollis and programmer Mark Edmonds, who created the
GoldenEye 007 engine, as some of the smartest people he has ever known. Hollis and his team were then offered to produce a game based on the
GoldenEye sequel
Tomorrow Never Dies, but they turned it down without hesitation. He explained that they were all "pretty sick" of the
James Bond universe by the time
GoldenEye 007 was released, and that their next game needed to be different enough for him to be interesting. In late 1998, after becoming head of software at Rare and having worked for 14 months on
Perfect Dark, a
spiritual successor to
GoldenEye 007, he left the company, partially because he wanted to pursue other interests and did not want to renew another four-year contract with Rare. Although
Perfect Dark was released 18 months later, his contributions to the game were significant and the game's protagonist,
Joanna Dark, was his creation. After leaving Rare, Hollis took some time off and spent six months in
Southeast Asia. According to him, "I couldn't see myself staying in
Twycross [the small village where Rare is based]. I wanted to see more of the world—wanderlust I suppose." Following a recommendation by Chris Stamper, Hollis then worked as a
consultant on the development of the
GameCube at
Nintendo of America in
Redmond, Washington. One of his responsibilities was to ensure that the GameCube hardware was game developer friendly. In 2000, he founded
Zoonami, a video game development company based in
Cambridge. The company's philosophy was to conceive innovative ideas and develop them further. At Zoonami, he worked on
Zendoku, a
Sudoku-based game released in 2007, and on his final release in 2009:
Bonsai Barber, a hairdressing game. Zoonami was closed in 2010 and Martin Hollis has not released any new games since 2009. Hollis was a regular contributor to the
GameCity event in
Nottingham, where he talked about the cultural importance of video games. ==Selected works==