GOLDEN EYE

Gamers knew the score in the Nineties. Rare made platformers, you played first-person shooters on PC and any game based on a film was going to be awful. Then came Goldeneye 007 and changed all that. It was released two years after the film had hit the big screen, only a few months before the next entry in the franchise, Tomorrow Never Dies, came out, and with no great expectations of success, even from the team that had developed it. It went on to shift a staggering 8 million copies, making it the third biggest selling title on Nintendo’s 64-bit console, and invariably appears in the echelons of those perennial ‘Best Ever Games’ lists. It also made number ten in Retro Gamer’s definitive countdown in issue 150, in case you were wondering.

That success is perhaps even more remarkable when you consider that for the majority of the dev team, Goldeneye was their first professional title. Indeed, Tim and Chris Stamper, the heads of Rare, had to remind the team that “this wasn’t their university project” as development dragged on for over three years. Yet the fact that most of the team were new to the business meant they weren’t constrained with notions of what was and wasn’t possible in game design. If they thought of a good idea, they tried to implement it.

This naivety yielded some groundbreaking results. The game pioneered body-specific hit reactions, disconnecting the gun from the camera, the use of a sniper rifle, environment mapping (look closely and you’ll see lowres reflections of your surroundings on shiny surfaces) and even dual-wielding of weapons, all features which have become fixtures in the shooter landscape. More than that, Goldeneye proved that a story-driven FPS could work on consoles… and that deathmatches never really get old.

Gathering together all nine core members of the team has been inspiring. Some stayed at Rare and worked on its spiritual sequel Perfect Dark. Some went on to set up Free Radical, the home of the Timesplitters series. Some have stayed in games, others have moved on but all can agree on two things: being part of the Goldeneye team was an experience they will never forget and playing as Oddjob in multiplayer is always cheating.

» [N64] Home console first-person shooters at the time were seen as tricky to pull off, but Rare managed to do it in style. » [N64] Goldeneye has its fair share of explosions, and then some.