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An Oral History of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64
- d3sandoval 8y agoIf 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/ https://readonlymemory.vg/
- louthy 8y 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 8y agoQuake had a very basic gameplay compared to golden eye, espacially regarding level design and the diversity in weaponery.
- m-p-3 8y agoUnlike 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.
- louthy 8y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbLndV_f_vo
- rhino369 8y agoGoldeneye wasn’t ground breaking, but it was the first real playable, good, FPS on console. And it was a blast to play. It also did things right. Had a decent story, had good level design, great gameplay for console. Without it, FPS on console might not have happened. Though some would argue that would be a good thing.
- djmips 8y agoGood summary except the last hyperbole. There's no way FPS doesn't happen on console even if GoldenEye was absent.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIndeed. DOOM was out on the Sega Saturn and Atari Jaguar, at least. Speaking of the Jaguar, check out Alien vs. Predator for a console FPS that was years ahead of its time.
- culot 8y agoWasn't Doom already popular on consoles by then/before then? I think FPS domination was inevitable on all platforms, no single title could have stopped it.
- m-p-3 8y agoIt was far from a perfect game that's for sure, but it combines the elements of FPS, mission objectives, great level design (you might want to read how they managed to get some textures to fit the limited memory of the N64), a compelling story (that wasn't an exact replica of the movie, too many games make that mistake), couch/splitscreen multiplayer along with cheats you could unlock by being good at speedrunning. All together, those made a great game for its time.
- maxerickson 8y agoThe 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 8y 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.
- crtasm 8y agoIndeed, I wasn't impressed with the game but that's partly being unused to the controller and mainly being previously spoiled by multiplayer Doom when a friend brought his laptop over and 4 player on my college LAN.
- culot 8y ago> for many who didn't have a powerful PC at the time, In the late '90s I think most people did not have a PC at all. They were only just becoming affordable as the millennium hit. Surely console systems were more prevalent.
- gm-conspiracy 8y agoWas GoldenEye the first FPS that could support 4-player versus on a single console?
- Kagerjay 8y agoTo my knowledge yes, but quake predated it but wasn't nearly as accessible
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoQuake didn't have splitscreen though, so it's not really a fair comparison.
- kayamon 8y agoI believe Hired Guns (1993) on the Amiga predated it.
- nothis 8y agoQuake 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 8y agoMost 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 8y 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.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIndeed, 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.
- ThomW 8y agoI 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.
- louthy 8y 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.
- ThomW 8y agoOh I’m aware. I wanted those insane frame rates. I lived in bumfuck Pennsylvania where high speed Internet wasn’t going to arrive for a decade, so I wanted something to make the game cooler. Haha
- ledriveby 8y agoQuake was 256 colors of mud with super choppy character animation.
- petepete 8y 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.
- bluedino 8y agoIt 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.
- scarface74 8y ago18 was considered too young to have alcohol but it’s still old enough to join the military, legally sign contracts, etc.
- jgalt212 8y agobut not old enough to rent a car at market rates (25 in U.S.) Hertz and Avis were well ahead of the game. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164708 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164...
- scarface74 8y agoAnd insurance companies had enough sense to charge an arm and a leg to a single 24 year old with a Mustang. My insurance cost more than my car note back then.
- emidln 8y agoWhen I was on my first business trip at 18, I couldn't check into a hotel in Michigan by myself. I had to call me contact at (then) DaimlerChrysler to meet me for check in. I had a credit card that could buy a brand new car, but I couldn't get the key to a $75 hotel room due to age. I later found out that, at the time, there was no law preventing me from acquiring the room, but the hotel policy was to not allow unaccompanied individuals under 21.
- jdmoreira 8y agoI 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.
- jgalt212 8y agohaving 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".
- jdmoreira 8y agoI grew up in Portugal and in a poor region. We were very privileged compared to our peers.
- pjmorris 8y 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 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/eg.elc.accs.zs
- o0-0o 8y agoWhat a trite little post. You are ahowing your inner sadness. Lock it back up quick.
- dang 8y agoPosting like this will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
- jstarfish 8y agoPlaces 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.
- orev 8y agoOne 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 8y agoyou're describing literally ever multi-player game before the dawn of the internet. it wasn't limited to just Goldeneye.
- orev 8y agoYes, 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.
- giobox 8y agoNot 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.
- adrianparsons 8y agoI'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.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAgreed, just look at the amount of innovation in indie games compared to AAA titles.
- combatentropy 8y agoI 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.
- lobotryas 8y agoEven 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 8y agoIs 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 8y 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.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAlmost like a prisoners' dilemma - either one gets money or none of them do.
- dev_dull 8y 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 8y agoWere 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 8y agoThere 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 http://nincheats.net/index.php?sys=n64&game=Goldeneye%20007
- dev_dull 8y agoReal button-sequence cheat codes! Isn’t it wild how long it took for them to be known?
- rangibaby 8y agoI 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 8y agoSo 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.