Every N64 FPS #3: GoldenEye. Again.
[Every N64 FPS] Returning to GoldenEye.
There are 2 laws on the internet: Godwin’s Law, which asserts that somehow, some way, every discussion online will manage to circle its way back to Hitler, the Nazis or comparisons thereto and now Scanlines’ Law: the longer FPS games are discussed or reviewed, the more inevitable it becomes that I start talking about GoldenEye again.
My GoldenEye review, while I stand by it, was written at a time when I had no real audience, no consistent format and no idea on my own voice in regards to games writing; in the year and 4 months since, all that has changed.
Let’s look back at GoldenEye. Again.
Year Of Release: 1997
Platforms: Nintendo 64 Exclusive
Developer: Rare
Publisher: Nintendo
Copies Sold: More than 8 million (#3 best-selling game on N64)
Remastered: XBLA Remaster cancelled but is available online, re-released on Xbox and Switch Online, reimagined on Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with GoldenEye 007 Reloaded.
Background And Development
By the mid-1990’s, Twycross-based Rare was already a titan of the industry.
Founded in 1982 as Ultimate Play The Game: a name so bad it’d prompt layoffs today, the fledgling developer found success making games for the many 8-Bit computers available in the pre-NES and Master System space, like the ZX Spectrum and the Commodore 64; remember, there was no crash in Europe, so the early PC gaming scene was still relatively healthy.
But by the late 1980’s, Ultimate Play The Game was renamed to Rare and the company pivoted to making games for Nintendo’s NES.
Rare’s NES games are mostly forgotten about today: overshadowed by their work on the SNES and particularly the Nintendo 64. Of these titles, you’ve most-likely heard of Battletoads: which is notorious for is humorous aesthetic, a 2010’s Gamestop prank call trend and for being one of the hardest games ever made and WWF Wrestlemania: which laid the foundations for wrestling games to become an institution later.
What Rare did next on the SNES hardly needs an introduction.
Given free-reign over the -then dormant- Donkey Kong IP, Rare created what is in my opinion the greatest 2D platformer ever made: Donkey Kong Country and its 2 sequels. Killer Instinct and its sequel were also developed by Rare for the SNES. Both the DKC Trilogy and KI sold millions upon millions of copies (in a time where gaming was still relatively niche mind you) and cemented Rare not only as Nintendo’s most valued third-party partner but as the standard bearer for the entire British video games industry.
By the time the second half of the 1990’s arrived and it was known that Rare were developing a First Person Shooter based upon the most beloved British IP of all: James Bond, you might imagine that excitement was off the charts… but you’d be wrong. GoldenEye the film came out in 1995; most of the team developing GoldenEye the game had little experience, add to that the ever-evolving understanding of what exactly the Nintendo 64 would be capable of and the difficulty in teaching a team of novice developers how to make a 3D title and you have the recipe for a game that launches 2 years late. The tie-in game stigma dogged GoldenEye throughout development, this and its delays made the game a subject of mockery in the gaming press before it had even come out; think Skull and Bones, except imagine if it came out, changed a genre forever, sold tens of millions and won Game of the Year.
Rather than DOOM, GoldenEye 64 actually took the most inspiration from the likes of Super Mario 64 and Sega’s Virtua Cop, with attention also paid to Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, which came out earlier in the year and set a high bar for FPS games on the Nintendo 64. Part of this game’s charm is just how amateurish it is. Genre-evolving shooting mechanics and levels that look exactly like the scenes in GoldenEye -thanks in no small part to the team being allowed to take photos there- rub shoulders with framerates that hit the single-digits and level design so redundant and naturalistic that you’d never see it in a modern FPS game.
GoldenEye is a wonderful marriage of opposites: a team of rookies working on the most established IP in cinema, the cutting edge tech of the Nintendo 64 versus design that can get too ambitious and a genre that people didn’t believe could work outside the PC being made a console exclusive; Bond is martinis, girls and guns, Nintendo is mushrooms, family-fun and digital safety… somehow this unlikely union created a stone-cold classic.
What GoldenEye Gets Right
Sublime, High-Skill Shooting
Fundamentally, GoldenEye has endured all these years not because of its infamous development process or even the love for the film it is tied to -a film which this game went on to surpass in revenue- rather, GoldenEye is still frequented because it is an absolute joy to play.
GoldenEye is beautifully kinaesthetic: a trait shared, in my opinion, by all the best games ever made. Enemies react in different ways depending on where they’re hit and have a variety of over-the-top death animations, Bond can lean around corners and over the top of waist-high cover: a mechanic that wasn’t made mainstream in FPS games until decades later in tactical shooters and the environment is filled with destructible objects, doors to open and buttons to tap; in a genre where you can often feel like nothing more than a pair of floating arms, GoldenEye 007, with its primitive 3D graphics and dated controls, still makes you feel like Bond, James Bond.
Video games need to start remembering how to implement difficulty without tweaking a bunch of numbers and GoldenEye is the perfect blueprint.
GoldenEye’s gunplay: a mixture of auto-aim and a free cursor mode ensures that even a child can pick up the N64 trident and start racking up kills but those brave enough to attempt a 00 Agent difficulty playthrough (and believe me, it won’t be easy) will need to master cursor aim in order to get headshots or blast weapons from the enemies’ hands: vital if you want to survive more than a few moments. As you move up the difficulty ladder, objectives become more numerous and complicated, enemies develop faster reactions and Bond’s fragility is heightened. GoldenEye is a brutal test of skill on 00 Agent but otherwise, I feel the difficulty is perfect and your duties as an agent significantly expand rather than the enemies’ health bars.
A Timeless Soundtrack
GoldenEye’s soundtrack, composed by Graeme Norgate and Grant Kirkhope (Robert Beanland is also credited but only worked on the music that plays in the lift) fits easily into my top 3; banger after banger. I listen to this OST frequently while writing or playing other FPS games with inferior music, pair it with any VR shooter and I guarantee you’ll be doing the Roger Moore eyebrow raise after each and every kill.
Eric Serra’s soundtrack for the film, while distinct, is famously divisive among Bond fans. On one hand, that pipe sound along with the darker instrumentation and synth-y tunes make it sound aggressively 1990’s and give the film a bit of a noir edge; on the other hand, some moments of distractingly poor music and the leaving behind of the signature Bond sound in favour of a new style left a poor taste in many mouths. Regardless of how you feel about the film’s score (I like it but I’m glad Serra only composed for GoldenEye as it adds to the film’s identity) I think we can all agree that N64 GoldenEye mixes the new and old together perfectly; the synths, the pipe sound and the noir-feel stay but the bombast and bravado of classic Bond return. I love it.
Rather Stocked
In the decades since GoldenEye 007 we’ve become accustomed to unambitious, short FPS campaigns. You know how it goes: a 5 hour, hand-holding romp through 8-11 levels, straight-forward level design and no reason to replay the campaign unless you’re keen on a certain level, need a story recap or want to hunt the platinum… GoldenEye is different.
GoldenEye features a robust suite of 20 levels each one containing 3 sets of objectives based on difficulty and even a time to beat in order to unlock cheats; like Super Mario 64, GoldenEye has a speed running scene that endures to this day. This alone will keep you occupied for quite a while but the amount of bang for your buck doesn’t stop there, plug in a few other controllers and you also get access to GoldenEye’s local versus multiplayer, where you and 3 other players can complain about the Klobb as you attempt to kill each other.
Something that isn’t discussed enough by retro people is that old games are generally lacking in content; they’re brutally difficult to extend a short runtime but GoldenEye has it all: quality, quantity and high challenge. Not only is this one of the cheapest N64 games but if you’re buying a console and can only afford GoldenEye to go with it, this game will more than tide you over.
What GoldenEye Gets Wrong
Performance And Scope
This video shows the framerate of GoldenEye 007 on original hardware during play.
It’s just a fact of every Nintendo 64 player’s life that the console and its games generally have a poor framerate. This is especially true for us in the PAL region where our games were capped at a lower FPS count… but our games also look slightly better, so I won’t complain too much. GoldenEye 007 is especially bad: bordering on unplayable in a lot of levels, actually.
I’m not whining about the FPS count dropping by 3-4 frames here, we’re talking plummets that hit the single-digits. When you’re dying because the performance makes it so you don’t have a clue what’s going on? That’s a big problem. Even when GoldenEye is running well, the smoothest you can expect to see it is around 17-18FPS; speed runners for GoldenEye stare at either the floor or the sky because the performance will grind you to a crawl otherwise.
What doesn’t help the framerate is the fact that many GoldenEye levels feel too large: almost maze-like in fact. The naturalistic environments and the exploration are highlights of this game but sometimes Rare go a bit too far, my least favourite mission: Archives might be the worst offender, even now after dozens of hours I always get lost on that level.
Quantity Over Quality
For every level like Dam or Silo (the latter becoming one of my favourite levels in any game since I started playing GoldenEye in 2024) there are two more like Archives or Depot; GoldenEye features 5-8 levels out of 20 that are absolute classics and a joy to replay, a couple that are mediocre and a lot more that are just a chore. Every level has its fans but in my opinion, there are more crap ones than great ones.
While I applauded GoldenEye earlier for the amount of content included, it also makes me appreciate the low-fat, lean FPS campaigns of today, where whole levels are regularly cut and length is sacrificed for the sake of consistent enjoyment.
Impotent Gadgets
One of the weakest aspects of GoldenEye is its arsenal. For the majority of the game you use either the PP7 (Walther PPK) which is probably the best gun in the game if you know how to aim, or the KF-7 Soviet (AKM) which shears through groups early on but eventually gets replaced by the higher damage US AR33 (M16A2) besides these mainstays, you are spoon-fed a few additional pistols and submachine guns, most of which are awful.
Some ‘highlights’ are the Klobb: a submachine gun so hideously weak and underpowered that it has lived on in gaming infamy, the Throwing Knives, which are a nightmare to aim without being shot first and the Sniper Rifle, which isn’t particularly useful outside of the few missions where you’re in large outdoor spaces and its zoom function is marred by the N64 controller’s awkward layout.
GoldenEye barely features any classic Bond gadgets, something the Bond FPS games of the EA era would have to remedy later.
GoldenEye’s Legacy And My Closing Thoughts
For me, GoldenEye was one of those special few games I’ve played so far in retro that truly lived up to expectations. I adore this shooter.
I’ve told this story many times here on the Journal but like a stuck record, I’ll play it again: I did grow up with the N64 despite it being a little bit before my time because I received one: the Pikachu N64 with Rogue Squadron, Pokémon Stadium and Pokémon Snap, for my 9th birthday, I never did own GoldenEye… but I was an absolute TimeSplitters fanatic on PS2 as a kid… still am. Therefore, combined with my love for Bond, it was almost pre-ordained that I was going to love GoldenEye but I still don’t think it gets enough credit; all I hear online these days is whining about the controls and the difficulty but once you get used to piloting polygonal Pierce, it’s an absolute blast; I’ve always found the likes of Tomb Raider or early RTS games to be much more uncomfortable to control than GoldenEye.
It feels superfluous to celebrate the legacy of GoldenEye because we see it all around us, it has changed console gaming forever and veered the FPS genre on a new path. Halo: Combat Evolved, Half Life and especially Medal Of Honour all took inspiration from GoldenEye: Valve were stunned by AI behaviour in GoldenEye, Medal Of Honour came about from Spielberg seeing his son playing GoldenEye and Halo’s exploration-focused, open environments are a natural evolution of GoldenEye’s vision.
Whether you enjoy GoldenEye or not, its legacy demands that you remember it. If Rare are ever freed from Microsoft’s clutches (or from the Sea Of Thieves update mines) I hope they get a chance to make another ground-breaking FPS, one that isn’t an extraction shooter, a 5v5 PvP game or riddled with hideous skins.
Join me next time as I fill an unexpected gap in my 4 articles a month schedule with some new hardware.
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Quick correction - Rare have never been in Guildford. Ultimate Play the Game where based in Ashby de La Zouch which despite it’s incredible sound, is in the midlands.
They then moved to their current home as Rare which is near Twycross
I could hear the soundtrack in my head while reading this, haha. Sign of a classic game right there.
Excellent writeup!