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​GoldenEye 007 N64 Game Is 22 Years Old

​GoldenEye 007 N64 Game Is 22 Years Old

Released on 25 August 1997 on Nintendo 64, GoldenEye 007 featured a single-player campaign in which players were able to become Bond

Jess Hardiman

Jess Hardiman

We're fairly spoilt when it comes to both the quality and variety of first-person shooter games these days, which have come a long way since the humble beginnings of video gaming in the early 1970s.

But while the market is now saturated with the likes of Call of Duty and Apex Legends, back in t'day there was another groundbreaking game paving the way for the genre: GoldenEye 007.

PC Gamer references 1973 game Maze as one of the earliest examples of first-person shooter games, along with 1992's Wolfenstein and 1993's Doom as the ones that helped popularise them. But the title that sticks in most people's minds has to be Rare's video game adaptation of the 1995 James Bond flick GoldenEye.

Rare's GoldenEye 007 was a landmark in the first-person shooter genre.
Rare

Released on 25 August 1997 on Nintendo 64, GoldenEye 007 featured a single-player campaign in which players were able to become none other than James Bond - played in the movie at the time by Pierce Brosnan - to prevent a criminal syndicate from using a satellite weapon to trigger global financial meltdown.

Assuming the role of Ian Fleming's British secret agent, players start off in 1986, in Arkhangelsk in the Soviet Union - where MI6 has discovered a secret chemical weapons facility at Byelomorye Dam.

Bond is then shipped to Severnaya, Russia, to investigate a satellite control station, before he must look into an unscheduled test firing of a missile in Kyrgyzstan two years later.

For the rest of the game, things fast forward to 1995, which takes us to locations including Monte Carlo, Severnaya for a second time, Saint Petersburg and the Caribbean.

GoldenEye 007 has a globe trotting story which took in Monte Carlo and Saint Petersburg.
Rare

Karl Hilton, who worked on Rare's original development team for the game, explained some of the processes that went into making the now-iconic title.

"When we had plenty of film material, we tried to stick to it for authenticity, but we weren't afraid of adding to it to help the game design," he told Now Gamer in a Making of GoldenEye piece in 2011 (as referenced by Tech Times).

"It was very organic. Dave [game designer David Doak] would come in and say he needed an extra door and a room somewhere and we'd add it in. Back then, it was so much quicker. It'd be half a day's work to add in a new corridor and a room."

Doak also discussed the game's stealth gameplay, saying: "It wasn't realistic, but it meant the less you shot, the quieter you were, the less enemies came after you."

He added: "If an NPC that hadn't been drawn and was just standing in a room waiting was alerted by gunfire, it would duplicate itself and one went to investigate. You can see it happening sometimes - if you go to the right place and make a noise, you see more enemies spawning."

Featured Image Credit: Rare

Topics: GAMING, Technology, James Bond