Goldeneye 64's inspirational startup story
alexbaldwin.com
alexbaldwin.com
This was one of the greatest games ever made, no doubt. I've actually never been able to relate to a lot of my buddies who can game for hours on end. Starcraft, WoW, etc.. bore me after 30 minutes.
Goldeneye on the other hand ... I could have easily died from starvation without the parental supervision.
Anyhow, back to the original post. It's interesting to me that the original team had no idea what they were doing. I still look back on apps or things I built years ago, lacking absolutely any idea of what I was doing, and being amazed at how successful or great they ended up. Inversely, sometimes the product or thing I spent the most time agonizing over ended up being a total flop. More and more I am learning that you just gotta side with the majority of the 80/20, stick to your gut feelings, and jam jam jam to get that puppy out the door.
It's always tricky to find that perfect place between being a bootstrapped/scaffolded/barebones MVP product and a well-thought out, carefully designed product. I'm glad the Rare team managed to hit it with Goldeneye, they're an inspiration.
I'm not sure exactly what it says, but I'm a decade older than you, and I lost countless days to this game. The best opponent I had was four years older than me!
I don't quite understand the love for the four player multi though. It seemed unplayably choppy to me with with that many opponents, but I never did get that expansion pack that sticks in the front. Also didn't care for the limited view range. But heads up multi-player... fantastic.
I remember Perfect Dark (the spiritual successor to Goldeneye) required it to run most of the game.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_64_accessories#Expansi...
I went to bed pretty quickly after that - my vision came back, thankfully :)
Edit: This was about 3am, for the record, after I'd been playing for about 12 hours or so.
Immediately prior to reading this, I was writing about how non-game developers can indeed bring a unique perspective to the table when developing games. This is definitely an inspirational story and helpful in reaffirming my thoughts. Thanks for sharing.
My favorite modes were one shot kills with knives or slappers only, power weapons with health cranked up, or anything involving prox mines :>
I haven't played it for years now, and I'm not sure how easy it is to get N64 consoles now, but if you want something similar, TimeSplitters for the Gamecube had very similar gameplay (and a lot more options, including bots and fully customisable loadouts).
God that was a great game.
Eventually it balanced out because everyone would be a lot more careful about getting close and going around corners, but ... let's just say that raegquits are a lot more fun in-person :)
One shot kills created a whole different kind of experience where you needed to be ultra careful about exposing yourself.
Talk about a non sequitur.
You don't understand why people promote themselves? You made it to the end of the blog post, which likely indicates that you enjoyed the content. Why wouldn't he say "hey follow me on twitter so that if I write another post that doesn't make it to HN front page, you can hear about it," to try to get some extra followers? Would you prefer he ask you to follow him at the beginning of the post?
Holding your readership in higher regards than a meaningless metric can be worth a lot in the long run, too.
I actually looked for the twitter button on his site so that I could follow him - since I did enjoy the post and would like to see more from him. Didn't feel manipulated though.
The way he embedded the suggestion seemed contrived and inorganic to me. If some one puts a link to their Twitter account beneath a post, I know what to do if I want to follow them because of their output.
If I have confidence in my output I will trust my audience to find the right degree of involvement they want to have with me. No need to push it. Maybe I'm weird that way, but I think the OP knew exactly what he was doing, and stuff like that rubs me the wrong way because I find it undignified, harshly put.
The people that make their work matter in the world find ways to extend influence and this is just one small tactic that simply works.
[1]: http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_golden...
Especially in levels like the bunker, if you hovered just a breadth out of distance in a two-player game, it was possible to wrack up multiple kills very easily and would often take an equally experienced player to even have a chance of making it to the nearest weapon in time.
It took me weeks to realise that the cut-scene graphics were actually useful and not just fluff. They often provided hints and tips or let you know about enemies.
There's a bunch of stuff still in the rom code that isn't accessible from the game - the hidden island; some glitchy levels. And there's some bits left over from the "notorious" but removed "put your face in the game" mode. (Which used the GB camera to map face photos onto game models for multiplayer but got removed after a mass shooting.)
I loved the train; I loved the tunnel in the damn. I hated trying to keep the bloody hostages alive on the boat. The first few times I set the alarm off were scary.
This was an amazing game. The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why.
That's arguably age-related nostalgia. I feel the same way about the Super Nintendo instead of the N64.
In "top 10 games of all time" lists the only Playstation game you tend to see is FFVII, which deserves its place but is more a triumph of storytelling than gameplay; from the N64 Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye both regularly feature. It was only towards the end of its life that we saw Playstation games comparable to those in technical terms (heck, while it's been overshadowed by later instalments I remember being blown away by Rogue Squadron back in '97 or so), and I don't think we ever saw the equal of Perfect Dark until the next console generation and Halo.
IMO the original is much much harder than the follow-ups. Those licence tests were hard. (And a great part of the game play that they only really realised in much later incarnations, that tiny short challenge had the "just one more try" feature that's important for good addictive game play.)
Tomb raider is an interesting choice. It's a huge franchise, and very very popular. Some parts of the games were really good. But the games did suffer from unnecessary bugginess. Which is weird because that company produced other great games that were not full of bugs.
Owning many systems is, obviously, something that people who love games should be doing. BomberMan on SNES is god-like multiplayer; MicroMachines on Genesis / megadrive is the best version; etc.
It's a shame that as the hardware (and the storage medium) is dying that people have to rely on emulation. Mostly this is great. But for some systems it's not, and for all systems it's not legal.
It'd be nice if there was a simple way to pay for playing roms, and if people could work on emulators for dead systems without facing scary legal stuff.
There's a clear reason why the N64 sold way less than the PS1: it was just a much better deal to get a PS1 if you wanted to play lots of different games. The market is not stupid :)
Sure, but I think it extends to top100 or even top1000 games; my point was that the N64 has more of the high end. Unless you're a video game reviewer or something you're probably going to play <50 games over the life of a system, and for most people who play a variety of games (sure, not if you're a dedicated fan of a single genre) I think the N64 top 50 beats the PS1 top 50.
The PS1 undeniably had more third-party support and far more games, and sure that means more variety. But if you're talking about whether something's a "poor system for games", I'm more bothered about having the best games than having a wide variety of genres. (Hell, I count the Game Gear as a "good system")
>There's a clear reason why the N64 sold way less than the PS1: it was just a much better deal to get a PS1 if you wanted to play lots of different games. The market is not stupid :)
Careful. By that logic the Wii is the best of the current generation (and I don't think either of us believes that).
I think "sweet spot" is the wrong term.
There were some excellent games. 1080; Super Mario 64; Golden Eye; some of the Zelda games. These aren't just "very good", these are "among the best", and they are still very very good games.
I'll admit there were also some real duffers. Superman, that claymation fighting game, etc.
Sega Saturn has been mentioned, and that had some great games despite some serious flaws with the system. Sega Rally on Saturn is almost perfect, even though you only have 3 cars and a handful of tracks.
Tangential to OP's article, http://console.fm is awesome.
GoldenEye 64, Blast Corps, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark.
After MS buyout?
What is amazing about Viva Piniata was that my retired mom (afraid of turning on the computer) got interested seeing me play and started playing herself! She ended up unlocking every single feature/award in the game, and this led her to play other Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I got her the first iPad when it came out and she is now essentially a regular computer user! While Viva Piniata might not have been a commercial success, I know one life it changed and I'd bet there are a lot more.
Frankly, I wish the world had more daring developers/game companies/people. The situation with Rare isn't a good one as your quip points out. Sadly, no matter how artistically awesome your games are, without commercial success, you cannot survive. This leads to a world of xbox games where pretty much every game is a shooter. IMHO, that is why tablets are kicking console gamings behind. It seems more creative titles for tablets (and perhaps the indie game section of xbox live) than for the xbox today.
Martin Hollis, the other senior member of the team also left for pastures new after working on Perfect Dark.
I'm sure Rare still has a lot of brilliant hard working team members, but the main drivers of GoldenEye have long since gone.
[1] Disclaimer: I used to work at Free Radical at one point.
Edit: And by that I mean you should take point and make it happen ;)
They redid the original Goldeneye for Wii and sadly I bought it. It's a horrible remake. Aiming with pointing using the Wii Remote is really hard and turning around takes ages, but this isn't the worst thing. They changed the multiplayer game mode: You can't pick up other weapons as you could in the 64 version - you have to chose in the beginning which weapons you'd like... I always loved this in the 64 version (proximity mines..oh yes :D)
Point: Maybe more mainstream games should be created by inexperienced teams to compete with the 6-month Call of Duty plot change cycle (i.e. same shit different day).