“GoldenEye 007” might be the biggest conundrum (or at least the toughest call for inclusion) on this entire countdown of what I consider to be the most essential retro video games a person can play.
On the one hand, you have a game that is by many metrics among the most important games in the entire history of gaming. GoldenEye personified a platform – the Nintendo 64 – in a way few other games have ever come close to doing. It provided a template for first-person shooting on home consoles for essentially the next decade (and to some degree, it mapped out what developers are still doing today). And it was immensely popular, providing joy (and misery) to countless millions of people.
However, on the other hand, you also have a game that is virtually unplayable for many younger gamers, who upon playing it will almost inevitably declare it overrated and terrible and miss the whole dang point of why it mattered in the first place.
The reasons for this are easy to identify.
Firstly, it’s the general look of the game, which featured early-polygons that are fuzzy, colorless, and ugly and offer comically unrefined edges, creating the “blocky” effect that so many games of that era had.
“Oh hey, that guy looks like an extra from Dire Strait’s ‘Money for Nothing’ video!”
“Wow, that lady’s chest looks like Madonna’s famous cone bra for some reason.”*
* That these jokes are themselves somewhat dated does not escape me. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We all get old. I linked to the source material for the younger pups out there. Also, here’s a more modern version for you: These people look like less colorful Minecraft characters.
So yes, the graphics were super ugly. But that would be easy to forgive with good controls and … WELP.
Yeah, here you’ve got to contend with that wonky N64 controller,* early first-person “tank” controls that everyone has by now (justifiably) declared to be entirely inefficient at accomplishing things (you can’t aim or move quickly), and perhaps worst of all, critical stuff mapped to those silly yellow arrow buttons on the N64 which are annoyingly small and difficult to find in real time … which is unfortunately what we’re dealing with here – real-time battles wherein baddies are trying to shoot you in the face.
* The N64 controller is famously wonky. It features three prongs giving it the appearance of a tripod, those stupid tiny yellow buttons your fingers can’t locate without you glancing down at the controller (getting you killed in the process), and a cute little joystick for analogue control which is positioned squarely in the middle of the controller for some reason and baffles newcomers endlessly. The idea behind the whole thing is that you use the middle prong when you’re using the joystick and the left prong when using the standard d-pad, but that’s not intuitive, people constantly get it wrong, and the whole dang thing is super weird regardless.
In summation, the controls and visuals of GoldenEye 007 can best be described as “dated” and at worst be labeled as something akin to getting a splinter stuck under your fingernail.
You don’t want that there. It hurts. As a piece of a greater whole, it served a purpose. But now it sucks and you want it to go away.
These controls and graphics suck, and you want them to go away.
Thusly, encouraging people to play this is to invite scorn and misunderstanding.
And yet…
People LOVE this game.
I LOVE this game.
GoldenEye is an all-timer, and it represents a simpler time for so many of us, full of gaming, friends, laughs, continual virtual murder, and general hilarity. The flaws, such as they are, weren’t really flaws at the time, because nothing better existed to compare them to. It was just an awesome game.
So, the case for GoldenEye essentially comes down to this: Either we encourage people to play it knowing they simply won’t have the same experience people did in the late 90s, OR we let it be forgotten completely as us older people die off.
Morbid, I know, but that’s kinda the point here. What games shouldn’t pass away from our society’s consciousness. Which ones need to be celebrated and remembered?
GoldenEye, for better AND worse, needs to be celebrated and remembered.
So, prepare to have a nice, long splinter shoved up under your fingernail, because we’re doing this thing.
GoldenEye 007 at a glance:
Genre: First-person shooter
Released: 1997
Platform: Nintendo 64
No. 29 on IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time
I’ve touched on this a little before, but the development of the Nintendo 64 itself is a pretty wild story on its own, and it led to a bunch of third-party developers cutting bait and running.
What kicked off Sony becoming the dominant performer in the video game console market with its PlayStation brand was a falling out with Nintendo over a CD peripheral, originally developed as an add-on for the Super Nintendo/Famicom. Sony and Philips were each tabbed with bringing CD gaming to a Nintendo platform, but the peripheral model was eventually scrapped, leaving those two companies to sorta just fend for themselves.
Both companies took that somewhat personally and redirected all that research coin they spent to try to destroy Nintendo by putting their own systems on the market (Philips’ CD-i was decidedly less successful!), while Nintendo, due to system specs of what they were developing for the Nintendo 64, decided to ditch CDs entirely for cartridges.
“Ha, ha! Just kidding, guys!”
They thought the cartridges would work better with what they had.
This left Nintendo in a precarious position with game developers, who were all-in on CDs at this point, due mostly to those being super cheap to produce.
Developers flocked to Sony, the PlayStation took off commercially, and Nintendo had to reckon with this series of events for the next couple of decades.
Nintendo’s reasoning here, at that moment, was essentially some version of “our system will be more powerful, and that’s good, right?”
And to their credit, their system was the first “true” 64-bit gaming console, but that dedication to having more under the hood actually worked against them, and it seems to be a lesson Nintendo has internalized with every hardware release since (each being less powerful than the industry standard). Ironically, this dedication to games over hardware has left them at a distinct disadvantage at … attracting major third-party developers. Weird. (Though we can also allow that their model IS friendly to indies and they’ve done very well for themselves attracting those smaller fish.)
Perhaps because of some of this writing being on the wall – Sony and Sega (with its Saturn) had beaten Nintendo to market and had a year’s head start in trying to sell their systems – Nintendo wanted to make their machine stand out from the others as much as possible when the thing finally hit the market in 1996. Its processing speed and power were a big piece of that. The design aesthetic with the cartridges was another way to be unique. And the aforementioned weird-as-hell controller was certainly another method of standing out.
But arguably the shrewdest decision they made, and the one that allowed them to stay afloat and not just get absolutely destroyed in that generation’s console war (make no mistake, they got outsold by a significant margin, BUT they also didn’t have to drop out of producing gaming systems altogether like Sega eventually did), was to include four controller ports to encourage communal gaming.
Previous generations of gaming consoles had offered the ability to host up to four (or even five!) players, but that was through an add-on device that was often very rarely supported. Maybe a random publisher would do a one-off, but there weren’t a lot of games designed this way, and therefore it was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that consumers wouldn’t purchase the multi-tap device since there were so few games for it.
Nintendo included four ports for controllers out of the box, and while we can speculate about how central this was to their overall strategy, what it did do was coax developers to make more 4-player games.
“Hey, more people will probably want to play this with four players than they would have on the Super Nintendo, so let me go ahead and design this game around that.”
As a result, whether it was truly envisioned that way or not, the Nintendo 64 became a sort of “party” machine, where the whole dang point of owning one was to hang out with other people, as though we were all singing karaoke, except you know, not actually doing that and playing video games instead.
* I think there was also an element of price gouging in all of this, in which you gave the consumer 100 different add-ons to buy, asked them to purchase them, and well, how could they say no? “Sure, I don’t like having money. Let’s bait-and-switch this thing until I’ve dropped $400 instead of the advertised $200.” After all, asking people to buy three extra controllers was a way to earn profit three more times. Nintendo wasn’t first in line in adopting this practice, but they’ve certainly committed themselves to it as a general ethos ever since.
“GoldenEye 007” came along in the summer of 1997, a full year after the N64’s debut. The game followed the exploits of one famous literary and film character James Bond in its story mode (mirroring the events of the movie for which it was named for), but then it also grafted the characters from that Bond universe onto an arena battle mode which could accommodate up to four players. The objective in single-player was to kill everything that moved, and so it was with multiplayer as well. This all took place from a first-person shooting perspective, giving the proceedings more immersion and urgency. The game landed as the N64 was still trying to establish itself, having sold reasonably well in North America but fairly poorly everywhere else.
Still, what the system had done to that point was establish itself as a hardware powerhouse as shown off in the system’s 3D performance with games like Super Mario 64, and as a multiplayer haven, with such games as Mario Kart 64 and Wave Race 64 drawing attention among early adopters of the system.
GoldenEye was an immediate smash hit, selling over 8 millions units (third most on the system), and it, along with Mario Kart, lived up to that promise of giving players 4-player mayhem to enjoy. Other games quickly followed suit.*
* Diddy Kong Racing and Bomberman 64 would also drop by the end of 1997, with erstwhile multiplayer behemoths Super Smash Bros and Mario Party landing in the coming years.
Now, this was all admittedly a bit unlikely when you take a closer look at it. The development team was a fairly inexperienced group from Rare (one of Nintendo’s best third-party supporters of that era), boasting precious little experience in first-person shooters, and they had to change gears several times during the game’s creation. And while the license of a “Bond” game had at least some juice, the associated movie came out well before the licensed game, in 1995.
So, this game was not going to sell movie tickets. Or even VHS tapes. It was a license that served no purpose.
I remember at the time thinking it was really weird, since games generally tried to come out at the same time as their licensed properties, and even if delayed, the delay was something like six months. Not two friggin’ years.
But lordy, this game hit like Matt Foley crashing through a coffee table despite all of those challenges.
From the moment you first boot the game up, you get smacked in the face with a soundtrack that is complete fire, and it’s all uphill from there until you inevitably die and see the pitch-perfect death screen.
Seriously, the music never lets up, and it’s among the best soundtracks a game has ever boasted.
But the game itself also rocks. Launch the multiplayer mode, and you’re thrust into memorable battle arenas with a truly awesome arsenal of weaponry to destroy your opponents with, a wide range of goofy (and slightly less goofy) characters to control, and truly just a dizzying amount of options to select from to tailor your shootout into a unique experience every time.
It’s worth taking a minute to linger on this point, as these options are a critical piece of the overall experience, as through their utilization the gamer gets to see some of the more memorable lore in all of gaming.
Don’t believe me?
Mention the name Oddjob* to anyone over the age of 35 and see how they react.
* Amongst the most notorious of playable characters in gaming history, Oddjob – he of “Goldfinger” fame – is comically undersized compared to every other character in the game, making him too short to shoot via your standard perspective and viewpoint. Couple this with the sloth-like tank controls of the N64 controller, and he becomes borderline impossible to kill in the hands of any decently skilled opponent. The rules of engagement in “GoldenEye 007” are therefore really quite simple: No one is allowed to compete as Oddjob. Anyone playing as Oddjob deserves to have their underwear pulled up over the top of their head.
In terms of lore though, Oddjob really is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ve got those blasted proximity mines to deal with; the golden gun option to one-hit kill your opponent; the iconic Klobb and Walther PPK; random-ass characters like scientists and civilians to joke around with; and other characters from Bond’s history like Jaws, Baron Samedi, and Mayday to enjoy. And oh yeah, all the GoldenEye tie-ins themselves.
“I am INVINCIBLE!”
The multiplayer mode, once the action begins, does have its limitations. Similar to playing a sports game with other people on a single TV screen, there is nothing to prevent the other people from looking at your view to see what you’re planning to do. So basically, be ready to hunt or be hunted, especially as your opponents learn the environments and can begin to recognize where on a map you might be in short order.
This does create a “game within the game” level of strategy to things however, as players, when they know others can see their screens, can try to make others think they’re strategizing a particular way and then juke into something completely different.
Is this realistic? Nah, of course not. But many modern games utilize radars in much the same way, tipping off gamers to the locations of their opponents to artificially recreate this same hunting dynamic.
What’s the downside to modern games in this regard? You’re not all in the same room together, hooting and hollering in mirth as ridiculous occurrences unfold in the game. Are you instead shouting at strangers into your headset? Cool. That’s not the same as literally punching your best friend in the arm for them killing you with a proximity mine for the 12th match in a row.
Also, this game still slays even when you’re playing by yourself. Having revisited the game fairly recently, I can speak firsthand to the single-player mode being perhaps unfairly maligned in retrospect. Yes, a 4-player battle royale is anarchy in the best possible way. But the single-player game features a story and objectives that dovetail nicely from the events in the movie, culminating in a tense, vicious battle atop the radar dish from the film’s climax.
It’s all very well executed.
We spoke earlier to the general unpleasantness of the graphics and controls, and that is all still true.
But, I’d venture to say that if you dig a little deeper on both, you might begin to appreciate that they each ultimately get the job done.
The visuals by and large provide a clear understanding of what’s going on around you. Enemies are easy to identify, NPCs and bosses often have distinctive looks to differentiate them from the aforementioned enemies, and so much of the styling of the game has that James Bond look. Paired with the killer music and sound effects, and it pulls you in.
Yes, people look blocky. But they look like blocky versions of their movie character selves.
That these people look something like their original incarnations goes a long way in attempting to convey an entertaining story.
Objectively, the controls are slow and clunky, but functionally, they work just fine. That’s because the enemies are themselves slow to react and/or engage, giving you time to make the movements necessary for survival.
Realistic this isn’t. But does it work? It does. The game is fair. It’s playable, and it’s even enjoyable if you’re down with some wonkiness such as enemies reacting to you in an exaggeratedly slow way. (This can at times be very funny to watch unfold. I challenge you not to crack up as an enemy very slowly does the electric slide while you’re unloading a machine gun into him)
I might also suggest that these controls and graphics are, in and of themselves, an important part of the whole. Looking at the unvarnished truth of what gaming was like back then can be instructive. It informs you of where we came from, makes you appreciative of where we are now, and it might even inspire you to consider and innovate for the future.
Can lessons be learned here?
I think so.
For example, four-person split-screen is simply a massively fun way to do things.
Still.
Today.
Don’t believe me? Go fire up a more modern game like MarioKart 8 and get back to me.
So what makes it worth playing today?
Rare’s output during the mid-90s was friggin’ incredible. From the Donkey Kong Country games, to Killer Instinct, all the way up to ingenious platformers like Banjo Kazooie and Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Rare was simply COOKIN’ in those days.
GoldenEye 007 might have been their most important success.
Some people will alternatively go to the mat for GoldenEye’s semi-sequel, “Perfect Dark,” which debuted in 2000 to a strong critical reception, as being the superior game, and sure, at least from a technical perspective, you can make that case. The game was missing the Bond license, but it had pretty much everything else, including an entertaining story and some fun tweaks from the original GoldenEye formula.
The original game also inspired a slew of licensed attempts to recapture the magic of the first game, either through use of the GoldenEye name and characters themselves, or through the use of James Bond’s extensive library of other characters and stories. There was even a full-on remake released for the Wii in 2010.
None of those games hit in quite the same way. And certainly none of them were as influential or as popular as the original GoldenEye.
And that’s indeed the tie-breaker for me in regards to Perfect Dark as well. GoldenEye was a huge success and spawned a gazillion copycats, setting the modern standard for first-person shooters on home consoles. Perfect Dark … did not do those things.
Wolfenstein 3D beget Doom, which beget Quake and GoldenEye, which beget Half-Life, which beget Rainbow Six and Unreal Tournament, which beget Call of Duty and Halo, and so forth and so on.
GoldenEye, for all of its flaws, is an important piece of that history.
Plus, for us olds, the thing is still fun. It’s not going to be the best game or even the most popular game in this countdown, and it’ll appear here before some genuine classics, and that’s okay, because it’s my list. This sucker was hours and hours of good clean fun (unless someone insisted on being Oddjob).
So let’s retire our original analogy. GoldenEye is less like a splinter under the fingernail, and more like your friend punching you in the arm. Yes, that also hurts, but at least it connects you with other people in the way a sliver of wood could never dream of.
And that’s ultimately worth the bruises.
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (N64)
- Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S (through Xbox Game Pass)
- Nintendo Switch (though Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack)