An Oral History of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64
melmagazine.com
melmagazine.com
1) This post is about GoldenEye, so that’s what we’re talking about.
2) It doesn’t matter who is first or if other things are similar; it’s undeniable that some games just happen to hit on a certain combination of elements that makes them a hit, and others just don’t, even if they have the same feature list.
3) At the time, most FPS games were single-player with some kind of storyline, with multiplayer being mainly an afterthought. GoldenEye has a pretty good storyline for single-player, so people would buy it for that, and then just happen to have it for the multiplayer. This no doubt contributed to its popularity, as most people just had it around and it turned out to be a great thing to do with friends too.
Sure, you’d been able to play Doom et al over a LAN and so on before Goldeneye, but the intimacy of the experience when you and three close friends are gathered around a single tiny CRT TV was something no Doom LAN deathmatch ever matched for me. Being able to watch your fellow players in real time on the other three quarters of the display also added a dynamic that LAN based shooters rarely had, when every player was hidden behind their own boxy CRT. What’s more this made the experience great even for observers who weren’t playing - at a glance you could watch the state of the entire game and all the players from your seat.
The many fun game modes (Golden gun, Slappers only etc) all contributed to a party style experience that very few other multiplayer games, typically with their much more straight laced approach to gameplay, had. Four player gameplay seems quaint now, but it was a very rare feature in console games prior to the n64, and of course almost always required additional hardware to add the extra ports. I suspect a majority of Playstation owners never even saw a MultiTap adapter, let alone owned one, given how few games could take advantage of it.
Let’s not forget the cost angle here either - while many of us may have been lucky enough to have participated in Doom LAN games, it was a pretty expensive (and technical) undertaking beyond the reach of many people, especially kids, in the mid 90s. Goldeneye was much more affordable and is all the better for it.
It wasn't just Goldeneye, true, but Goldeneye was one of the console's best sellers, it was out within the first year, and it was arguably the first really top-shelf FPS for any console, so it left a big impression.
I’d love a source too, if anyone has one...
I never had an N64 to practice so I'd just run around with a Laser or grenade launcher and try to spam2win (or at least take someone down with me).
A few of my friends and I still get together every now and then, have pizza, sometimes drink, and play videogames together, only now it's from across the US using video and voice chat.
Whether it's super smash bros, overwatch, or any number of silly/stupid steam games that someone picked up for a few dollars one day, that "social" aspect is still right there waiting for you just the same as it was, but now you have MANY more options of games to play, and ways to play them.
Most successful so far are Broforce, Monaco, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
God I miss weird, fun weapons in the days before every shooter played the same, and had to be balanced to sub-micron specifications.
At one point, he’s had four friends over all with PS4s playing against each other on separate displays in the house - thank goodness for wired gigabit Ethernet through the house and a bidirectional gig-e Internet connection that didn’t even blink at the traffic. My wife and I were still able to watch DirecTVNow....
Back in the day, they would have to drag desktop computers, CRT monitors and known how to network them for LAN parties.
They stuck around even well after better consoles and games came along-- most of us ended up going down the Sony side of the PS2/Xbox/GC generation, which was limited to two players without a multitap. The N64's four controller ports were really a killer feature for the system-- it meant that the only thing you needed for four-way multiplayer was to have each player bring along their controllers from home.
Legal drinking age is 18 in the UK, I'm amazed it's as high as 21 in the US.
Hertz and Avis were well ahead of the game.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164...
I later found out that, at the time, there was no law preventing me from acquiring the room, but the hotel policy was to not allow unaccompanied individuals under 21.
During high school, and prior to attending Driver's Ed classes, we had an assembly organized by various local chapters of anti-drunk driving groups, where a guy in his late 20's spoke about being amputated below the waist, because when he drove into a large tree, the engine block rebounded through the dashboard, and onto his pelvis, coming home from the bar one night. People talk about how prior to automotive safety standards developed in the 1990's (air bags, anti-lock brakes) cars were absolute death traps, and I believe it.
That movement achieved some of its goals with those laws, and receded during the 1990's when broader programs encompassing drugs and social diseases were more normalized.
I think it makes sense, because in the United States, people find some amount of identity in the cars they own, which seems to be less intense throughout Europe, where driving absolutely everywhere isn't as ingrained into daily life and culture.
But they say this is because almost everyone who has an alcohol use disorder started drinking before they were 18.
I'm not sure they've got the causal direction correct.
Maybe when we create an AI that can test games for us.
Erm, what? Quake already existed at that point. I always thought Goldeneye was poor compared to Quake, which was really mind blowing at the time.
I must admit that GoldenEye is a bit slow-paced compared to Quake, but I partly blame the N64 controller for that. They still managed to make a great-looking for its time with the hardware resources they had.
Which also wasn't groundbreaking. Plenty of games were objective based, going back to the 8 bit era. A game like Exile [1] on the BBC Micro was easily as complex as Goldeneye, if not more so.
The control aspect alone of Goldeneye was awful. As a game it always felt forced and 'clunky' to me, compared to the smoothness and elegance of Quake.
And it was a blast to play.
It also did things right. Had a decent story, had good level design, great gameplay for console.
Without it, FPS on console might not have happened. Though some would argue that would be a good thing.
Speaking of the Jaguar, check out Alien vs. Predator for a console FPS that was years ahead of its time.
I think FPS domination was inevitable on all platforms, no single title could have stopped it.
All together, those made a great game for its time.
(More copies of Goldeneye sold in 1998 than Quake sales for 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 combined...almost 2x.)
It also became a benchmark for console shooters, good multiplayer or get out.
Exactly. I always thought Goldeneye was inferior to contemporary PC shooters, but for many who didn't have a powerful PC at the time, Goldeneye was their first FPS and they probably feel the same way about it as I do about the original Doom.
In the late '90s I think most people did not have a PC at all. They were only just becoming affordable as the millennium hit. Surely console systems were more prevalent.
Quake was a blast, but we weren't all in the same room, let alone the same couch.
I don't think comparing the games themselves directly really encompasses the difference in the playing experience.
I have fond memories of my Quake LAN parties and meeting to fight/exchange Pokémon on the Gameboy.
Playing GoldenEye on my friend's N64? I hated it. Found it pretty boring, and so did everyone else (except the N64 owner).
YMMV of course, circumstances are different, which I think is what OP was pointing at. E.g.: if you're on the USA PC gaming isn't (wasn't?) as ingrained in your culture as in Europe.
- It ran on a console and not a $1000 PC.
- The game managed to go beyond what had been done in Doom and Quake, and actually have cutscenes that tell a story. Some of the cutscenes were super cinematic — especially for their time.
- Four player splitscreen was a hoot.
You didn't need a 3D card to play Quake, its software renderer was amazing in its own right. In fact, I much preferred the aesthetics of the software renderer over the blur-fest of the bilinear filtering on the 3dfx cards.
I've been diving deep into some of the articles there lately and am excited to see what else they come up with, given how so many of these stories are locked away within the mind of a few game devs.
Tragedy of the anti-commons.
Sadly there were only so many mines you could lay before the first ones started disappearing.
I’m still amazed at how long it took for the cheat codes to become known. I remember scouring the early internet and finding nothing but guides. It wasn’t for years before I saw they existed. Other games had their codes published in magazines almost the same day they were released.
Banjo Kazooie has the same thing, a ton of things in the game are accessible by entering special codes in the... sandcastle? Sorry it’s been a while