Life moves pretty slow in a video game magazine when the last few pages are sent to the printer. As a writer at Edge, I had to be available in the office to write subheadings and headlines, but we were often there late into the night while the art team was laying out the pages. So writers and subscribers would have nothing to do but wait and play. And for many months, the game we played was GoldenEye.
Released two years after the film, in a market where tie-ins were never exactly epoch-making products, it’s fair to say that expectations were low for the N64 shooter. But this was a shooter from Rare, the Midlands-based veteran developer of Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct, and the game that would introduce many gamers to the concept of using an analog stick to look around in a 3D game: it’s hard. exaggerate how important it was.
But it was the multiplayer mode that really counted. Four players, one screen, a variety of locations and weapons, and all the characters from the single player campaign. Sneaking through the corridors of the Basement, lurking in the jail cells in the Bunker, hiding in the bathrooms in the Facility: these were seminal moments in first-person multiplayer game design, introducing more complex notions of stealth, surprise, and time delay. the shared gaming experience. We usually played on Normal mode, but as the hours passed and the sunlight began to sneak through the blinds, we would switch to Slaps Only, where players could only kill by slapping each other. It was great to get that very British sense of goofy comedy into a seemingly violent genre.
It’s interesting how the fables about the game and its development have survived and continue to intrigue. The fact that it is officially cheat to play as Oddjob in multiplayer; the brilliance of pause music, which has been well remembered on TikTok, and how it was written in just 20 minutes by Rare newcomer Grant Kirkhope. The fact that Nintendo legend and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto was so concerned about death in the game that he suggested a post-credits sequence in which James Bond went to a hospital to meet all the enemy soldiers at those who “hurt”. I think the sign of a truly great game, like any work of art, is how many legends are attached to its creation.
Now it’s lovely to see the game launch on Nintendo Switch and Xbox Game Pass, but it’s hard to imagine how modern gamers will react to what is now an artifact. You may wonder why we consider it so special, so innovative. They may not realize how many of the features we now take for granted in shooter games were inspired by this game.
For me, when I hear that music, when I see those weird cloudy visuals and blocky character models, I’m transported back to those late deadlines, a lot of us huddled in the Edge arcade, chasing each other down blank hallways with our Klobb submachine. pistols, sneaking a peek at each other’s portions of the screen to see where everyone was on the map.
but what to do you Do you remember the game? What were your favorite missions and characters? Let’s remember!
