An Oral History of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64

https://melmagazine.com/an-oral-history-of-goldeneye-007-on-the-n64-129844f1c5ab

by ForHackernews • 8 years ago

175 94 8 years ago

d3sandoval• 8 years ago

If you're interested in other oral histories and video game stories, I highly recommend Read Only Memory [1].

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.

[1] https://readonlymemory.vg/

louthy3• 8 years ago

What emerged was a masterpiece that changed the industry and set many standards still seen in first-person shooters today.

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.

sametmax• 8 years ago

Quake had a very basic gameplay compared to golden eye, espacially regarding level design and the diversity in weaponery.

petepete2• 8 years ago

Plus Goldeneye had the advantage of not being entirely brown.

digi_owl3• 8 years ago

But damn it was easy and flexible to mod.

m-p-32• 8 years ago

Unlike Quake, Goldeneye focus was objectives-based, where you had to do more than reach the end of the level, and based its difficulty system upon it instead of simply making enemies stronger.

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.

louthy3• 8 years ago

Unlike Quake, Goldeneye focus was objectives-based

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbLndV_f_vo

maxerickson• 8 years ago

The thing Goldeneye really brought was massive popularity.

(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.

firdak• 8 years ago

The thing Goldeneye really brought was massive popularity.

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.

gm-conspiracy• 8 years ago

Was GoldenEye the first FPS that could support 4-player versus on a single console?

swaggyBoatswain3• 8 years ago

To my knowledge yes, but quake predated it but wasn't nearly as accessible

kayamon• 8 years ago

I believe Hired Guns (1993) on the Amiga predated it.

nothis• 8 years ago

Quake was nice tech, but Goldeneye blew it out of the water in terms of gameplay and content. I always thought Quake felt like a very long tech demo more so than a game.

soneil• 8 years ago

Most my memories of Goldeneye involve having 4 people stuffed on a couch, cheap beer, pretending we weren't looking at each other's screens.

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.

kaoD• 8 years ago

Quake was a blast, but we weren't all in the same room, let alone the same couch.

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.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

Indeed, if you wanted something that felt like the best of both worlds I'd go with the original Halo, but of course that didn't come along until much later.

ThomW2• 8 years ago

I had the original 3dfx card just to play Quake, but there were a number of things that still impressed me about Goldeneye.

- 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.

louthy3• 8 years ago

I had the original 3dfx card just to play Quake

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.

ledriveby2• 8 years ago

Quake was 256 colors of mud with super choppy character animation.

petepete2• 8 years ago

will be the game’s 21st birthday, allowing Bond to finally taste one of his revered cocktails

Legal drinking age is 18 in the UK, I'm amazed it's as high as 21 in the US.

bluedino2• 8 years ago

It was 18 for a while during the 70’s. But kids were getting drunk and crashing and dying like crazy, so Ronald Reagan raised the drinking age back to 22 in the 1980’s with the threat of cutting highway funding to states that did not comply.

scarface744• 8 years ago

18 was considered too young to have alcohol but it’s still old enough to join the military, legally sign contracts, etc.

wowDude• 8 years ago

Drunk driving movements throughout the 1970's and 1980's are responsible for this regulation. Groups like MADD: Mothers Against Drunk Driving fought hard to change the way things were. Organizations involving people with relatives that passed away as a result of a drunk driving accident, which was frighteningly common back then.

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.

DanBC2• 8 years ago

Legal drinking age is five in the UK. It's 18 to buy alcohol.

Jaruzel• 8 years ago

Yup, and most savvy parents slowly acclimatise their children to alcohol by allowing them wine or beer on occasion with a meal when they are in their teens. Done right, by the time the child hits 18 they don't go crazy with booze, and treat it with respect.

jdmoreira2• 8 years ago

I wish I could go back to the days where our group would spend all our free time playing split screen GoldenEye at my friend's basement. If you were privileged enough (which we were) the 90s were a great time to be a child.

jgalt2122• 8 years ago

having friends, access to a basement and enough cash to purchase Goldeneye, or a friend with the cash, sets a very low bar for the term "privileged".

jdmoreira2• 8 years ago

I grew up in Portugal and in a poor region. We were very privileged compared to our peers.

pjmorris• 8 years ago

'Privileged' is very much a matter of what you're comparing against. In the 90's, about 25% of the world's population didn't have electricity [0], let alone game consoles.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/eg.elc.accs.zs

jstarfish3• 8 years ago

Places like Brazil have obscene taxes on game hardware so if you could afford a copy of Goldeneye with early-2000s money, you were a baller.

scarface744• 8 years ago

My son still gets together with his friends. They will bring over their PS4 and connect to his computer monitor in his room and they will play with each other “online” sitting right by each other.

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.

digi_owl3• 8 years ago

The latter was basically my thing in the neighborhood for a time. Started out with BNC connected coax and then upgraded the kit to TP and hubs/switches. Crazy thing is that i had perhaps the shittiest internet connection around...

subcosmos• 8 years ago

My midtower case has a big handle on the top of it. Its from that era! Don't see many of those anymore.

swaggyBoatswain3• 8 years ago

I remember in those days we used to ban playing oddjob because he had a shortness advantage

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

Haha, I think the "Oddjob ban" was pretty much universal ;)

jstarfish3• 8 years ago

I never understood the "Oddjob handicap." The game would auto-aim at anything in the center 1/3 of the screen.

JonathonW• 8 years ago

Goldeneye and Donkey Kong 64 split-screen were pretty much the go-to games for my friend group back in middle and high school (late '90s/early 2000s).

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.

tootie• 8 years ago

We did GoldenEye and Mario Kart 64. And when things got wild, Super Mario Kart would come out.

orev2• 8 years ago

One of the best aspects of GoldenEye multiplayer was social, real social, not in the “stream on twitch” kind of way. You had to all be in the same room, and you could yell and scream at each other, hear people’s reactions, other people could watch, share a few pizzas, and it just brought everyone together. These days everyone can be in their own room in different locations, and even with voice chat it’s just not the same. It really was the social aspect that made it amazing.

distantsounds• 8 years ago

you're describing literally ever multi-player game before the dawn of the internet. it wasn't limited to just Goldeneye.

orev2• 8 years ago

Yes, I could say the same about Mario Kart 64, Tribes, Unreal, Quake, or any number of other games, but:

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.

giobox2• 8 years ago

Not sure I’d agree, especially for first person shooters.

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.

Volt• 8 years ago

The Internet had definitely dawned before GoldenEye was released.

PhasmaFelis2• 8 years ago

Local multiplayer had been a thing for ages, of course, but the N64 was something special because it was the first significant console that supported four full controllers (not just paddles) from day 1 without an aftermarket multitap. There was unprecedented four-player support, and simultaneous four-player play is a different experience than passing around two controllers.

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.

ashleyn2• 8 years ago

The rise of cheap internet is what ushered this away. Even the original GE devs saw it coming. Perfect Dark, the followup using the same team and engine, was originally slated to ship with a modem and RJ-11 jack in the cartridge.

psergeant• 8 years ago

I’m struggling to find more info about this anywhere, do you have a link?

giobox2• 8 years ago

I’ve never heard this story either, and given the love for Rare products of this era and Perfect Dark itself I can’t imagine a juicy fact like this being hard to find online, I couldn’t find any references either. Prototypes of this would be fetching a fortune as well should they exist.

I’d love a source too, if anyone has one...

swaggyBoatswain3• 8 years ago

Let's not forget all the cheating too, the predated "stream sniping", or all the cardboard solutions used to divide up the screen.

lobotryas3• 8 years ago

True. Alternatively the group could decide that "screen-watching" is part of the game because anyone can do it. You just had to be good enough (knowing the levels and what people usually do in them) to take full advantage of it.

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).

Klathmon• 8 years ago

That feeling is still there if you want it to be.

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.

lobotryas3• 8 years ago

Not OP, but I'll agree to disagree. VOIP and webcams are fantastic, but if it can be arranged, nothing beats a LAN party. The required logistics, planning and actually being in the same room with my friends just take things to a new level (for me anyway).

PhasmaFelis2• 8 years ago

You can have a damn good time that way, but it doesn't quite measure up to having all your friends in the same room, IMO. I have a collection of single-screen 4-player games on Steam, and I like to pack along my laptop, A/V cables, and four gamepads when I visit friends. :)

Most successful so far are Broforce, Monaco, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.

ledriveby2• 8 years ago

All of the different MP modes kept it fresh too. When you got bored, you would flick on a few switches to make things unbalanced and silly.

GW1509143• 8 years ago

Perfect Dark was great for that too, with the tranq darts, and the laptop gun. I remember having so much fun with friends as we figured out the most rage-inducing ways tomabuse the laptop gun emplacements. Duke Nukem 3D was fantastic as well, with the pipe bombs and laser tripwires.

God I miss weird, fun weapons in the days before every shooter played the same, and had to be balanced to sub-micron specifications.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 8 years ago

You are looking at it from the wrong side though. I always have a lan party every new year's eve with my friends, and whenever I'm in my country of origin. However, I'm happy to have internet parties to compensate and keep friendship going when I'm back to the country where I live in. That couldn't be done with goldeneye, so I thank modern internet

adrianparsons• 8 years ago

I'm impressed with how small the dev team was, how much fun they seemed to have working, and how much freedom and creativity they had. I wonder if we stifle innovation by building crazy large hierarchies.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

Agreed, just look at the amount of innovation in indie games compared to AAA titles.

combatentropy• 8 years ago

I agree. I was surprised by not only how few but how young. To me it seemed the work of a large group of industry veterans.

lobotryas3• 8 years ago

Even with all the advantages they had (including, arguably, being single), they still had their own deathmarch (100 hour weeks) at the end. I wonder if it's at all possible to make video game development sane when you have a publisher?

Maybe when we create an AI that can test games for us.

kossae• 8 years ago

Is testing the biggest time sink in the process? I’ve always wondered, despite having obviously complex architecture, why game development cycles had such crunch times. I knew it was based on publisher deadlines and such, but figured the bottleneck would be more in development time rather than testing. If the latter is the case, given the progress of OpenAI, I could see that being a plausible solution.

gwern• 8 years ago

So we showed them we had all the Bonds… Well, soon after that we got a memo saying we couldn’t have all the Bonds, because only the GoldenEye actors had signed off on the digital rights to their likeness to be used in games, not the older movies. > Edmonds: So in order to represent Sean Connery, Roger Moore or Timothy Dalton in the game we would have needed to do a deal with their individual agents to get the rights. And unfortunately, it would have been too expensive. > Doak: They particularly said Connery would want money, and then if Connery wanted money and got money, the others would want money as well. So they got taken out.

Tragedy of the anti-commons.

SmellyGeekBoy7• 8 years ago

Almost like a prisoners' dilemma - either one gets money or none of them do.

dev_dull2• 8 years ago

A lot of the cheats were added by the code team

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.

wingerlang• 8 years ago

Were there other codes than the time based? Because if I am not wrong, they would be found by most people (given that they beat levels quick enough).

Jach• 8 years ago

There were button sequences you could use, they worked in multiplayer, and in singleplayer didn't count as "cheating" it like activating a time-unlocked cheat did.

http://nincheats.net/index.php?sys=n64&game=Goldeneye%20007

dev_dull2• 8 years ago

Real button-sequence cheat codes! Isn’t it wild how long it took for them to be known?

rangibaby• 8 years ago

I believe they were discovered after one of the button codes (more characters in multi) was officially released on the Goldeneye website.

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

xivzgrev• 8 years ago

So many awesome memories with this one. I liked how each multiplayer game had a theme: mines, pistols, etc. So you had to adjust playing style but you also got to choose. Led to a lot of variety.

Sadly there were only so many mines you could lay before the first ones started disappearing.

An Oral History of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64

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