Retro Geek Throwback Thursday: Goldeneye 007 for N64

It’s the Granddaddy of them all.

If you were to ask older gamers that hail back from the 16-bit or 32-bit cartridge gaming era what one of the greatest first person shooters of all time was, one of the answers you’ll likely get is Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64.

Really if there was one game that started the FPS craze on consoles, it would be this one. If you had a Nintendo 64 in the mid 90s there were really only four games that it seemed like everyone had to have: Mario Kart, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Smash Bros,, and the grand daddy of the first person shooter genre, Goldeneye.

There are facets of Goldeneye that you no longer see. What really made the game a memorable icon, was the fact that to play multi-player, you actually had to collect three friends and gather in a room and sit next to each other and then proceed to unleash hell upon on another. This made for some exciting matches because the player you are playing against is not behind a microphone miles away online, they are sitting there and are ripe to get trolled right after the match or even right after a grueling battle that ended badly for one player.

The one thing that really sets Goldeneye apart from shooters today is the controls. Now we have the seemingly ‘set in stone’ standard Halo control set with both sticks functioning together to look around and move and such. No, Goldeneye relied on the player using the one stick on the N64 control pad to move around the map and then to aim up and down or strafe using the yellow C buttons to do so. The ability to strafe effectively was one of the keys to multiplayer domination and extremely useful in the single player campaign.

Beyond being able to sit side by side and have a blast playing this game for hours, it also stands out as a game that not many others have been able to accomplish; It’s the perfect translation of a film to game. These days we see movies converted into games in a rushed fashion; the graphics are wonky or something is really off about the game that makes it more of a rental than a must own (example: Star Trek. Great voice acting by the new cast of the reboot, terrible everything else…). Goldeneye on the other hand captured the fun and all the action elements of the James Bond film that it is related to. Rare, the company that produced it, literally recreated the film in the game but also added fun elements like adding Oddjob and Jaws on top in special stages. It made it all that much more exciting, especially being able to play the tank level where you are rampaging in a tank through Moscow to chase down your nemesis. Also, for the time, the graphics were phenomenal for a 64-bit console game. Rare managed to capture quite a bit of detail in the characters faces and it all combined for that much more of a great experience overall.

Even the multiplayer level design reflected areas from the main story and the overall size of the maps and intricate details still rival some of the shooters being produced today. Each map was unique and different. Guns were very well balanced and it seemed like each player had their own preference as to what they would use during matches. My personal favourite was the DD44 Dostovei, which was a silver semi automatic pistol which was great for accuracy and helped me frustrate the hell out of my friends. On top of the standard weapons is a whole host of cool James Bond gadgets that could also help you in your quest to victory like proximity mines, remote mines, laser watches, and other fun goodies.

The multiplayer suite also supported a fairly rich set of game modes especially for its time and enabled the player to customize their game right down to the nitty-gritty details of the match. Within you would find five modes; Normal, which was straight up deathmatch, You Only Live Twice was just as it sounds where you get two lives and the last one standing wins, The Living Daylights, which was capture the flag, The Man With the Golden Gun was a infuriating game mode where one of the players must find the Golden Gun without being killed (that gun is a one-shot kill, by the way – kind of like One in the Chamber) and finally there was License to Kill, which was the equivalent of Swat mode where all weapons have the ability to kill with one shot. Of course, we always had that friend that made us play ‘slappers only’ in multiplayer and the game took FOREVER…

One of the things that likely led to Goldeneye being so good and so addictive was that it was produced by Rare right at the height of its existence as a company. They were making great hits like Killer Instinct, Perfect Dark, StarFox, Banjo Kazooie, and of course the always popular Donkey Kong Land games on SNES and N64 plus quite a few of the most fun games of the 80s and 90s. The point is, they knew how to make addictive and fun games that you could lose yourself for hours in. Those today may only recognize Rare for making games like Kinect Sports and the like, following their buyout from Microsoft.

So if you are looking for a challenging, fun, addictive older game from the 90s to really dig your teeth into, pull Goldeneye out, scrape off that layer of dust, and give it a go. Even all these years later, it still captures the magic of the movie its based on, and can give you a serious FPS challenge. In my personal opinion, this still stands the test of time as one of the best shooters ever made.