We present the details and early results from a deep near-infrared survey utilizing the NICMOS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope centred around massive M*>10^11^M_{sun}_ galaxies at 1.7<z<2.9 found within the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) fields North and South. The GOODS NICMOS Survey (GNS) was designed to obtain deep F160W (H-band) imaging of 80 of these massive galaxies and other colour-selected objects such as Lyman-break dropouts, BzK objects, distant red galaxies (DRGs), extremely red objects (EROs), Spitzer-selected EROs, BX/BM galaxies, as well as flux-selected submillimetre galaxies. We present in this paper details of the observations, our sample selection, as well as a description of the properties of the massive galaxies found within our survey fields. This includes photometric redshifts, rest-frame colours and stellar masses. We furthermore provide an analysis of the selection methods for finding massive galaxies at high redshifts, including colour-selection methods and how galaxy populations selected through these colour methods overlap.