A reader celebrates GoldenEye 007’s return to modern consoles and laments the fact that its many innovations have been ignored or forgotten.
It finally happened! After years of back and forth between Nintendo and Microsoft, Golden Eye 007 has finally been re-released on both Xbox and the Nintendo switch. They’re just ports really, not even remasters really, but I’ll take what I can get for what I consider to be one of the greatest video games ever made.
When it was originally released in 1997, on the N64, it was the very first first person shooter I had played, and I’m sure that was the case for many console gamers. It completely blew me away on every level, not only in terms of the basic concept, but also the sense of immersion, the quality of the graphics, the intricacy of the story campaign mission design, and the endless fun of the multiplayer.
It was a huge critical and commercial hit, yet due to the Bond license and Microsoft’s acquisition of developer Rare, it has never been re-released. Imagine if Doom or Halo or Half-Life or any 10/10 classic, regardless of genre, had come out in one format at one time and was never seen again despite its massive success. It’s unheard of and yet that’s exactly what happened to GoldenEye.
The problem with playing GoldenEye today is that it has aged a lot over the past 26 years. All the games are fine in terms of graphics, but there’s also the problem of the controls, which were designed around the N64 controller that only had one analog stick. There was some kind of dual stick mode if you used two controllers but I’m pretty sure no one did so any modern recreation has to work their way through trying to use the old scheme or use a modern one instead invent scheme.
I’ve only had time to play about an hour of the Xbox version of the game as it didn’t come out until Friday but here’s what it does and while it’s a perfectly logical route it immediately removes one of the most distinctive features of the original.
The real problem with the game not being available for so long is that people haven’t had time to get used to how old it is. All those other first person shooters I mentioned have been available in other formats forever and while N64 games haven’t been re-released very often, it’s still relatively easy to play classics like Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, especially after the launch of Nintendo SwitchOnline.
You can prepare for how these games look and play, and for the very low frame rates of the time, and that’s not too much of a shock. But with GoldenEye… I think there’s no way anyone could come back to it after a quarter of a century and not be disappointed with the way it looks. There’s probably never been a bigger gap between the predilection for how you remember a game and what it looks like when you play it now.
I’m only immune to this because I still have my N64 lying around and occasionally play with my brothers just like we used to. And that’s why I think it’s still the best of the classic retro games. It’s more fun and varied than Doom or Half-Life and while it doesn’t have online multiplayer, the first Halo didn’t either, and I liked GoldenEye much more in split-screen.
The other big problem with GoldenEye disappearing for so long is that many of the ideas that started it have been shelved or completely ignored. When GoldenEye came out, first person shooters in general were a relatively new idea – Rare was more inspired by Virtua Cop than Doom – and the way the missions are all little sandboxes with multiple secondary and hidden objectives… you get that in some games today, but it has never been common and few realize that GoldenEye started it.
Doom is just a map with monsters to shoot at, while every mission in GoldenEye is different, including vehicle sections, run ‘n’ gun sections, sieges, and more. GoldenEye also did stealth a year before Metal Gear Solid or Thief: The Dark Project and again, it’s been largely forgotten that this is one of the main reasons why that concept became so popular.
And then there’s the multiplayer. No simple deathmatch here, with much more imagination and variety in the weapons and modes than games that came out 10 or 20 years later. GoldenEye had it all and it had it all decades before anyone else. So welcome your old classic and maybe in another 26 years we’ll get a remake, or a new game, that will honor your legacy in a proper way.
By reader Gaston
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