Rare announced that they would be resurrecting the Nintendo 64 classic GoldenEye 007 to public excitement. It’s just over 25 years since one of the most revolutionary console shooters ever hit store shelves and filled couches across the world. Now, the company who brought the game to N64 has brought an enhanced remaster to Xbox and Nintendo Switch.
Read more: The Enduring Legacy of Nintendo 64
Fans have been clamouring for a remake of GoldenEye 007 for years. Licensing issues had prevented its release and it’s long been considered a ‘Holy Grail’ of retro remakes. With that in mind, let’s examine the enduring legacy of GoldenEye 007 and why it’s still a big deal a quarter of a century later.
Couch Competition
While it was far from the first console shooter, GoldenEye 007 was the first to make the genre viable on home consoles.
Full 3D environments and a control-scheme that allowed players to look around/aim relatively easily did not exist on consoles at the time. Considerations like auto-aim and a free aiming mode helped ease the genre on to console.
The addictive four-player multiplayer was apparently a last-minute inclusion but it spread the competitive shooting craze far and wide. Couch multiplayer modes became mandatory for console 3D FPS after GoldenEye 007. This, in turn, helped millions latch on to online console shooters when they eventually arrived a generation later.
Dual in the Crown
Mechanically, GoldenEye 007 has not aged well but its eight control schemes inspired a blizzard of improvements. Most of the game’s fans know that the game allowed players to use two controllers, one in each hand.
Armed with two tridents you had dual-analogue control – the first in console gaming. Though it wasn’t the default scheme and required two controllers, it beat Aliens: Resurrection to the punch by around three years.
GoldenEye 007 – A Modern Speedrunning OG
Rare’s licenced opus is famously competitive off the couch and has maintained its popularity in the speedrunning community for over 25 years. GoldenEye 007 served as one of the founding fathers of the modern speedrunning community.
The online speedrunning community was very much in its infancy when GoldenEye 007 emerged in 1997. The first modern speedrunning communities had sprung up in 1996 around Doom II on PC and Rare’s licensing opus served to raise the popularity of formal speedrunning, as well as introduce console gaming to the discipline.
GoldenEye 007 endurance as a relevant title in the speedrunning community was fostered by several factors. Levels were long enough to make them interesting to play but short enough to encourage repeat runs. A built-in timer tracked your run, kept it on-screen at the end so you could take a photo.
Read more: The Enduring Legacy of the Original Xbox
Most of all, the game was outrageously popular. Millions of gamers simultaneously sank hours into GoldenEye 007, unknowingly training to be the very best like no-one ever was.
Seeing their own best times on-screen on all difficulty levels as they played the game’s single-player mode surely encourage a few of them online to see how they fared. Discovering the nascent scene must have been an eye-opening experience. Here’s hoping leaderboards make their way to Rare’s remaster.
BOOM! Headshot!
While GoldenEye 007 was not the absolute first game to feature the headshot, it’s probably the most influential of the early adopters. The honour of the very first headshot in a first-person shooter goes to Team Fortress with its sniper rifle headshots added to the game in 1997.
For the masses, GoldenEye 007 was their first. The idea for the game’s locational damage with accompanying animation had come from Virtua Cop, according to Rare’s Martin Hollis. Hollis liked the mechanic of shooting a gun from the enemy’s grip and thought the animation was a nice touch to reward the player.
GoldenEye 007‘s headshots were an extension of this desire to reward the player with a cool animation. Initially headshots were not fatal but dealt double damage to that of a shot to the body.
As the game’s auto-aim feature became implemented, it was decided to draw to the centre of the body, making the headshot a high risk move that demanded skill. Eventually the idea of an instant kill as a reward for this skill, and as an ode to the supposedly realistic animations seen for other location shots, was born.
Rare’s remaster of GoldenEye 007 is ‘coming’ soon to Xbox Game Pass and Nintendo Switch Online.
