Featured image credit: Rare / Nintendo
Writing about bringing anything back I'm reminded of the Star Wars Prequels and the Ghostbusters remake and every band reunion ever. I also think about the sad fact that however much you might want something to be remade or rehashed, the actuality of a re-release has the potential to be a huge disappointment. Or, worse still, it can manage to take something away from the original.
So, I'm cautious in saying 'bring back GoldenEye 007', but my cautiousness probably demonstrates something about the magic of the game in itself - and what it meant to me and the thousands of other players who still consider it the best First Person Shooter (FPS) of all time.
Made by developers Rare, GoldenEye 007 was exclusively released for the Nintendo 64 video game console in August 1997. Back in the 90s, Nintendo were still making video game consoles, rather than Pokémon mobile phone apps and children's play things. Not just that, but some N64 games like Turok and Killer Instinct were downright brutal.
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You would never call GoldenEye 007 'brutal' but, at a time when video games were still thought of as entertainment for kids, being rated an 18 set it apart from lots of titles released for the console meant it was definitely a game designed for adults.
Image credit: Rare / Nintendo
GoldenEye 007 was a prototype for the FPS as we now know it. It built on Doom, which was released four years and it pioneered the genre. It introduced better auto-aim and, most importantly, it showed off the split screen multiplayer format at its best. If there was one thing N64 had over its rival, the PS1, it was the fact you didn't need any special equipment to play against three of your mates.
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As 36-year-old Iain tells me: "Me and my mates were the right age when it came out, 16/17, so it struck a chord for us. It wasn't the game's single player mode that made it, it was the multiplayer. For us, it was the real start of multi-player games and 'social' gaming.
"Four of us could be on screen at once and we were able to play as the characters from the Bond movies that we had grown up with. Not a lot of people had networks to play against each other when Doom came out. But with GoldenEye 007 you just needed a cartridge, console and a TV, and four pads."
At a time when online gaming means that most of us are playing against players from across the world on a day-to-day basis, we think of gaming as being more 'social' than ever. But GoldenEye 007 brought a different kind of social gaming, getting a few beers and a pizza in with the lads, a night of banter and having a laugh. This is the same kind of socialising as playing pool or going to the pub. Different from sitting in your bedroom talking to your mates through a headset.
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Image credit: Rare / Nintendo
Interestingly, the game's director, Martin Hollis, has recently admitted that multiplayer was an afterthought and was only added in at the last minute. Speaking at an event in 2012, he said: "One of the things that always strikes me as crazy in retrospect is that until something like March or April of 1997, there wasn't a multiplayer mode at all. It hadn't even been started.
"It really was put in at the last minute - something you wouldn't dream of doing these days - and it was done without the knowledge or permission of the management at Rare and Nintendo. The first they knew about it was when we showed it to them working. However - since the game was already late by that time, if we hadn't done it that way, it probably never would have happened."
I was only seven when the game first came out but, thanks to having parents who were relaxed about age restrictions, it was one of the first games I got for the N64 and the first game my cousin, sister and I would play when we came home from school. Mario Kart was fun, sure, but the death, the explosions and the gun had far more appeal to the macabre mind of a primary school kid.
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But when playing against them in multiplayer, secretly, I couldn't wait to be left alone with the game.
As a straight adaption of the James Bond GoldenEye film of the same name, the single player mode seemed to expand on the movie - turning, for instance, a two-minute bungee jump scene at the start of the movie into an entire map and creating new storylines. When I re-watched the film again recently I was surprised by just how much of the movie seemed to be missing - how the game and film's stories had fused in my mind.
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Image credit: Rare / Nintendo
The game had plenty of replayability - and thinking back I must have clocked hundreds of hours on it. Rather than simply making the single-player game more difficult by making it easier to die and the A.I. more intelligent, as many modern FPS do, increasing the difficulty from 'Agent' to '00 Agent', or the intense '007' mode, meant that to complete a level you had to meet more objectives. Nothing tops the satisfaction of completing final level 'Egyptian' on the hardest difficulty setting.
With all these features, it's no surprise that game is popular among retro-gamers. Gaz, a 24-year-old who still plays the game regularly, says: "GoldenEye 007 is one of the classics. Everyone who wasn't living under a rock played it when they were a kid. The things that made it great as a kid still apply. You can screen watch in multiplayer, which makes the entire thing hilarious. Different tactics apply; it means that you can run but you can't hide.
"You can change the weapon setting so that you have to slap your opponent to death. It might take half-an-hour but that kill shot is satisfying. All the characters are great. In what other game can you play as Oddjob and Sean Bean?
"The game is packed with loads of other treats which aren't present in modern games. It's still a classic that gets laughs with you and your mates."
So, here's to Goldeneye, a game that resonates beyond our childhood - a game changer that led us to COD and Medal of Honour and everything that's come since. What do you reckon then, lads, is it time to bring it back to modern consoles?
Words by James Dawson
Topics: N64, retro game, GAME, 007, Gaming, James Bond