Genre: First Person Shooter
Year: 1997
Developed by: Rare
Published by: Nintendo
Platforms: N64
#34
Feeling Like: For England, Henry? No. For the 500.
Out of every entry on the 500, Goldeneye 007 may have aged the least gracefully. It’s not a better game than Ori and the Blind Forest. Or Perfect Dark. Or any of the Bioshocks, or Uncharteds, or Portals. Not by a long shot. It was supplanted by Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001, which has since then been eclipsed by Call of Duties, Battlefields, and a slew of other rooty tooty shooties.
It looks ugly. Considering the amount of memory the developers had to work with (8 megabytes of RAM), it’s a miracle that you can easily make out the levels, guns and enemies. Everything looks like it’s supposed to, complete with doll-like features, jagged edges and unnaturally straight lines. So while the graphics are passable, they’re not the reason it’s at spot #34.
The framerate is really what drags it below the depths of acceptable by today’s standards. When you have four players all shooting at each other, it’s borderline unplayable. It’s messy. It’s permanently stuck in a time capsule from 1997-2001. I can’t convince you that you should play it today. In fact, I don’t want you to. Go away. Don’t play Goldeneye 007. Leave it for the old fogies who have nothing but stellar memories of multiplayer mayhem and trying to complete the campaign on 00 Agent. That’s why it’s this high on the 500 – I must have played Goldeneye 007 in at least 20 different rooms via various birthday parties and sleepovers. It was the reason you brought your own N64 controller everywhere you went. It was why you tried to collect every cheat, or scoured the “internet” (whatever that was) for strategies and secrets. It was the reason to own an N64 for every single red-blooded male who wanted to shoot things without consequence.
It was the usual crew: Scott, Dave O., Dave V., Dobbo, Kasim, Aslam, Duncan, Raymond and Eric. Some variation of that group was always present. Sometimes it would be friends of theirs I’d never met before, or somebody’s older brother but it didn’t matter – everybody knew Goldeneye 007. Nobody had to explain the controls, the only debate was which map (Stack or Facility, always!), which guns (proximity mines were a good motivator to break your controller), and which mode. Pistols + License to Kill was always a favorite. Or the Golden Gun, which is sort of the same thing, except you can camp the spawn point like a jerk. Or just let everybody have RC-P90s and let chaos reign.
We played so much, and I mean SO much, that eventually we’d go slightly mad and have a slap fight to determine a winner. Or go Klobbs only – the Klobb! Gaming’s punching bag, possibly the least powerful weapon ever. It was embarrassing to equip, you’d take ANYTHING over the Klobb – Throwing Knives even! Who brings a knife to a gun fight? The person going up against a Klobb, that’s who.
I’ll never forget Eric showing it to me for the first time. We were in his upstairs computer room (this was before we emigrated to his downstairs living room for the remainder of our Clarke Rd. stay). We played 1 on 1 in the Temple. He was merciful, and even let me shoot him a few times before ending me. He tried to explain that hitting somebody in the head would result in more damage. I’d never considered that – was this the first First Person Shooter I’d ever played? No, I’d played Doom, but I don’t think iD was overly concerned with WHERE you hit the demons, as long as you hit them. This sort of strategy wouldn’t have been new to veterans of the genre, but I was as green as they come. What the hell was Body Armor?
The single player route was nearly as much fun as the multiplayer. Endlessly repayable, you could always go for a better time, or better accuracy, or just see how many poor guards you could murder on your way to the exit. Beating the Facility in under 2 minutes and 5 seconds to unlock the Invincibility cheat was the single hardest thing I’d done in my life up to that point. I must have attempted that level 50 times – it required perfect aim, movement AND Dr. Doak had to randomly spawn in the exact right spot. But when I finally achieved it, and heard that magical “Whoooosh!” on the debrief screen, it was a jump up and down moment.
Eric and I would push each other to greater heights. Going through the campaign on 00 Agent was a must, and a race. He’d beat a level and call me. I’d do the same. I scored a break when his family went on vacation – I had nearly an entire week to try and take down Aztec before he got back. Aztec on 00 Agent is psychotic, trying to beat it is for masochists only. Every shot the enemy lands on you takes away an abnormal amount of health. The contingent of stooges were all armed with heavy assault rifles. They hid behind pillars and didn’t just run at you. There were turrets. Jaws was in there somewhere, though thankfully it wasn’t required to take him on to beat the level. Death after death meant more memorization, more cautious peeking out from a corner to take pot shots at somebody’s feet. Sometimes the plan would go awry and you’d just sprint for the exit. I finally beat it, and left a very boisterous voicemail on Eric’s family’s phone.
He beat it the next day, AND Egyptian too. Eric won in the end. He always did. Bastard 😉
The memories of how each gun sounds, or the death jingle are permanently entrenched in my brain. Reloading was snappy, the mission objectives went beyond “kill everything” (actually, I don’t think that was ever explicitly stated), the stages were complex and interesting and some were pulled right from the movie. It was a licensed product, after all, and what I think helped it stand out from the trash pile of cinematic-tie in video games was it was released two years after the movie was. Not exactly good timing, I’m sure the marketing people went crazy, but the hardware wasn’t ready in 1995. And nobody cared – all we cared about was the video game was terrific, beyond anything we’d seen before on a console. I heard Grade 12s at Oak Bay High talking about playing a session after school – Grade 12s! I was a lowly 8th grader, do you know how good it felt to get that kind vindication and validation? That our hobby was accepted and shared with people five years older than us? They could DRIVE, for Christ’s sake!
We used to stuff our controllers in our backpacks and bike to my place at lunchtime to get a few sessions in. It wasn’t nearly worth it – we only had 40 minutes before the start of afternoon classes and it took 10 minutes to get there and 10 minutes to get back. For what? Twenty minutes of shotguns in the temple while wearing our GNS uniforms? You’re goddamn right it was worth it. We stopped after teachers reminded us that we were cutting it a little close upon return – I just think they didn’t care for the odor that seven sweaty, adrenaline fueled teenagers emitted. I don’t blame them.
So, don’t play Goldeneye 007. Even if you find some HD texture pack, or definitive edition, or a PC port with mods. It’s not worth it – there are plenty of better shooters out there that won’t frustrate you with archaic design and simple enemy AI. But how many of them can replace the joy we had hollering at each other because of a well placed Remote Mine, or crying foul at somebody picking Oddjob (total bullshit, not allowed!) or me chanting “BorisBorisBoris” when I was attempting to evade Aslam’s sniping. Or Kasim revealing the cut content on the Dam level thanks to the GameShark cartridge.
That death jingle drove our parents nuts, if they were unlucky enough to be in earshot.
How about that killer pause music? Has the Bond Theme ever sounded cooler?
The Silo Music was always my favorite of the bunch.
Now that I think about it, the music was good. Really good. Should I be surprised? Rare couldn’t miss for the span of a decade and anytime Grant Kirkhope is at the helm, you know your ears are going to be subject to some bangers.
When constructing the 500, I just knew Goldeneye 007 would be very high on the list. Far higher than it deserves, because of the incredible times I had with friends, or pushing through solo on the campaign. This was Halo before Halo. It may have been ahead of its time, but it was one hell of a welcoming party for console based shooters.
It still floors me to this day that the multiplayer wasn’t originally planned! Nintendo didn’t even know about it! Insane how a quick experiment led to the most iconic part of the game, the lasting legacy people will remember. Myself included.
The 500 