This Week In Retro: GoldenEye 007 (Patreon)

August 23, 1997: "For England, James?" "No, for the Nintendo 64"

by Diamond Feit

I've always found the first-person perspective in video games to be exhilarating. From early wireframe arcade games like Atari's BattleZone and Star Wars to the in-your-face action of id Software's Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, first-person games just hit different than traditional third-person experiences. When I'm lining up enemies in my crosshairs all while bullets fly directly at the screen, I feel an extra layer of tension, as if I'm actually taking fire.

You may have noticed a pattern in the games listed above: none of them were made with consoles in mind. Many made their way into living rooms eventually—with Doom in particular famously ported to every possible device, console or otherwise—but when the first-person shooter genre initially caught fire, it did so almost exclusively on computers. When home consoles attempted first-person games, they tended to feature narrow labyrinths, testing players' pathfinding abilities more than their reflexes. Nintendo's autoscrolling StarFox on SNES offered a cockpit view, letting you feel the heat in Fox McCloud's seat, but only during the outer space stages.

Everything changed once 3D graphics became the norm for home consoles in the mid-1990s. Within months of the PlayStation's 1994 Japanese launch, developers experimented with fully-immersive first-person action games such as the original King's Field and Jumping Flash. Even Nintendo knew their next console needed to feature more polygons than 2D sprites, and the Nintendo 64 launched with one of the greatest 3D action games of all time, Super Mario 64.

Despite Nintendo’s kid-friendly image, the company softened its strict content policies during the 16-bit era to allow ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom on the SNES, although these ports did feature subtle edits to remove excess gore and giant rats replaced the Nazi dogs. Those standards loosened even further as the 90s wore on, and it didn’t take long for third-parties to bring first-person shooters to the Nintendo 64. Akklaim's Turok Dinosaur Hunter and an exclusive version of Doom from Midway debuted in early 1997, with both titles rated M for blood and violence.

Yet the arrival of a completely different game that summer would end up making the biggest impact, popularizing the first-person shooter on home consoles en route to becoming the top-selling non-Mario cartridge on the Nintendo 64. Even more surprisingly, this game was a licensed tie-in to a movie that had already long come and gone from theaters, its eventual unhyped release in the slow summer retail season a sign that no one at Nintendo anticipated how popular GoldenEye 007 would prove to be.

The character of James Bond had spent decades influencing popular culture prior to the release of GoldenEye 007, and had starred in licensed video games as early as 1983. However, most of these releases left little to no impression on their intended audience. I grew up adoring James Bond thanks to his many film appearances and yet I couldn’t tell you any details about any of these early games. To me, the best James Bond games merely took inspiration from his adventures without actually starring the secret agent himself, as seen in the gadget-laden driving game Spy Hunter and Data East’s side-scrolling action shooter Sly Spy.

Adding to Bond’s problems, the character entered the 1990s with the funk of old-fashionedness hanging over his head. The world’s most famous secret agent rose to popularity as a Cold War superhero, seldom fighting the Soviet Union head-on but often tasked with preserving the balance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact and working to prevent the global superpowers from escalating their rivalry into an outright nuclear conflict. Progressive Soviet politics in the 1980s poked so many holes in the Iron Curtain that the “Evil Empire” seemed eager to earn our friendship. Even in Bond’s final Cold War film, 1987’s The Living Daylights, the story sees him work with the head of the KGB in order to root out traitorous elements inside the Eastern Bloc. By the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Bond had already moved on to battling South American drug trafficking.

Both GoldenEye the film and GoldenEye 007 the game represented a major reboot for James Bond. The fall of the Soviet Union and a legal dispute between the franchise producers and the studio put his cinematic series on hold for an unprecedented six years, the longest gap between Bond films until COVID-19 delayed the release of No Time to Die. GoldenEye would not only feature a new actor in the lead role, but many longtime production personnel had also parted ways with the series; the script leaned into this paradigm shift, sending Bond on his first-ever mission inside Russia and having the new head of MI6 call out Bond on screen as “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War.”

While Nintendo would publish GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, development duties fell to British studio Rare, a company that had already established a long-term working relationship with the Kyoto game giant. Initially assigned to only a handful of people, the project grew in scope and as time wore on and costs rose, Rare kept adding staff to get the game completed. Ultimately, the game launched in August 1997, nearly two years after GoldenEye’s 1995 theatrical debut and a full year after the Nintendo 64 first hit the market.

From the moment a player powers on the console and boots GoldenEye 007, the game presents itself as a cinematic experience. Following a parody of the British Board of Film Classification rating system and the usual corporate logos, the game begins just as every James Bond film has done since 1962. Against a black background, a gunbarrel pans from left to right to find Bond, only for Bond to turn and fire, killing the sniper as blood pours down the screen. Opening credits follow, introducing the characters as the "stars" of the game, all to reinforce that GoldenEye 007 itself is nothing more than an interactive show for the players' benefit.

Beyond the obvious stylistic homage to the medium that made James Bond famous, GoldenEye 007's filmic aesthetics also serve to downplay the violence contained within the game. With his license to kill, the silver screen version of James Bond has no qualms about mowing down rival agents, enemy soldiers, or the occasional hired goon, but Nintendo executives expressed anxiety concerning the level of murder by firearm a player would necessarily have to execute to complete the game. Shigeru Miyamoto even suggested adding an epilogue to the game where Bond goes to a hospital to visit all the people he shot, confirming to the player that everyone in GoldenEye 007 walked away in one piece. As incredible as that would have been, Rare's move to credit the "actors" in-game facilitated enough disbelief to rob the action of any sense of realism, and the ESRB agreed: GoldenEye 007 was rated T befitting the original film's classification as appropriate for teenagers.

The story of GoldenEye 007 closely follows the events of the 1995 original, and many levels allow players to re-enact setpieces from the movie. During the game's long development cycle, Rare had permission to visit the shooting studio during production and took detailed photographs of sets and props in order to better recreate them on the Nintendo 64. However, GoldenEye's 130-minute runtime would make for a very short video game, especially considering that the expositional and character-building dialogue scenes would not translate well into a first-person action experience. No combination of button presses or analog stick wiggling would transform Bond's conversations with M or Moneypenny into engaging gameplay.

Rare's solution to this dilemma was to extend the events of the film, building upon existing scenes to expand or even create brand-new sequences for the player to enjoy. The first level of the game serves as a perfect example: While GoldenEye opens with Bond bungee-jumping off a dam to infiltrate a secret chemical weapons facility, GoldenEye 007 begins with Bond making his way to the dam through Soviet security, turning his death-defying leap off the top into the level's climax.

Adding detailed objectives to every level of GoldenEye 007 further bolstered the gameplay while also creating a flexible difficulty system. Most first-person shooters offered little direction beyond "find the exit" or "kill the enemies," but befitting Bond's role as a spy, GoldenEye 007 gives players tasks to accomplish in each level in order to progress to the next stage. By choosing from Agent, Special Agent, or 00 Agent difficulty, players have the freedom to increase or decrease the number of objectives. This selection precedes every level, rather than the game as a whole, letting players dial back the challenge if they find themselves stuck on a particularly overwhelming assignment.

As an adaptation of a hit film, GoldenEye 007 does a fine job of translating Bond's big-screen adventure to a game console, but its faithfulness to the source material wasn't the real reason the game became a classic. Instead, its multiplayer mode transformed it from a well-crafted licensed work into a genre-defining titan. Taking full advantage of the Nintendo 64's built-in four controller ports, GoldenEye 007 welcomed players to shoot it out amongst themselves across a selection of different arenas and using a variety of preset weapon packages, including a melee-only setting called "Slappers Only." Players also get their pick of any character model in the game, including a few famous villains from older Bond films. A planned feature would have added classic Bond actors as well, allowing for Pierce Brosnan to face off against Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and Timothy Dalton, but licensing concerns forced Rare to remove the other likenesses.

The multiplayer mode allows for all possible permutations of battles: one-on-one, two-on-two, three-on-one, or a team-free deathmatch where every player must fend for themselves. Without any online options, these matches require dividing the television screen into smaller, dedicated viewpoints for each player. This causes the frame rate to stutter when too many objects appear at once, especially when explosions create entirely too much smoke and debris which had to be rendered four times over. These technical limitations mean that GoldenEye 007 doesn't hold up well to present-day scrutiny, as we all have access to high-resolution online firefights that support scores of simultaneous players with no slowdown or hiccups. Yet for the time, Rare and Nintendo had delivered an entertainment package like no other, and the game flew off store shelves for years after its initial release.

Despite selling millions of copies and fueling bedroom and dorm room firefights for the remainder of the decade, GoldenEye 007 had a surprisingly brief legacy as a playable video game. Nintendo published the game exclusively for their own console, one that did not sell nearly as well as the NES or SNES had. The licensed nature of the game irrevocably tied every aspect of GoldenEye 007 to a property fully owned by another corporation, preventing any potential Virtual Console releases or ports to other platforms. Microsoft's purchase of Rare in 2002 muddied the waters even further.

Yet hope persists thanks to Perfect Dark, Rare's spiritual sequel featuring an original story & characters; despite being another Nintendo 64 exclusive, today Xbox owners can purchase an HD remaster of Perfect Dark with modern twin-stick controls and online multiplayer. A hi-resolution remaster of GoldenEye 007 actually leaked online in 2021, and an official-looking achievement list pops up periodically to suggest that the impossible may yet come true. The chances of a commercial re-release remain slim, but when have overwhelming odds ever stopped Bond from coming through in the past? Never Say Never…again!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.