GoldenEye 007 turns 20 today
20 years ago today, August 25th 1997, GoldenEye 007 was released for the Nintendo 64. Sometimes, I feel like the only person who remembers, or cares. I don’t mean to sound bitter, but GoldenEye remains my favorite game of all time. It hasn’t aged particularly well, but it was the first game I bought with my own money, the first game to really get across to me what was possible with 3D polygonal graphics. That no one is doing anything significant to celebrate its 20th anniversary, or even seems to remember, seems like a real shame to me.
GoldenEye’s protracted, unorthodox development cycle at Rare is well documented, but what seems to go unsaid too often is that GoldenEye was 1997’s equivalent of Halo. It demonstrated that first person shooters could not only be done on a console, put done surprisingly well. GoldenEye predated Half-Life by a year and pioneered concepts like objective-based mission structure, enemy hit-detection and weapon reloads. Its four-player split screen multiplayer, practically a last-minute afterthought, turned out to be a revelation all by itself.
GoldenEye has often been imitated, but never truly succeeded or replaced. Rare’s 2000 follow-up Perfect Dark was far more ambitious, but flew a bit too close to the sun and ran rather poorly on the N64. A fan made multiplayer revival of GoldenEye on the Source engine was released a couple years ago. In 2010, a modern reimagined remake of GoldenEye, starring current Bond actor Daniel Craig, was released on Wii, and later ported to Xbox 360 and PS3. This “GoldenEye Reloaded” was fantastic in its own right, but it still wasn’t the same.
The closest we ever got to a true HD remake of GoldenEye came in 2008. 4J Studios, a close associate of Rare, nearly finished a high definition up-convert of GoldenEye. There are gameplay videos circulating on Youtube and HD GoldenEye is truly a thing to behold. Sadly, it was not to be. Microsoft—who owns Rare—and Nintendo couldn’t reach a legal agreement, and GoldenEye HD was shelved, cursed to languish, unreleased, on a hard drive at 4J studios for eternity. Not content with this, 4J released an HD remake of Perfect Dark on the Xbox 360 a couple years later, finally allowing the too-ambitious game to reach its full unfettered potential. To be honest Perfect Dark HD was pretty brilliant all on its own, and it even included some weapons, skins and multiplayer maps from GoldenEye.
For now at least, it seems like the only way to relive GoldenEye is by digging out your dusty old N64, or fighting with a janky emulator. The game is forever mired in copyright hell; Microsoft owns Rare, Sony owns the James Bond license, and Nintendo owns the publishing rights to the original game. It’s a depressing state of affairs, especially considering nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it for the game’s 20th birthday. In any case, I still care, and so do countless GoldenEye fans who grew up with the revolutionary FPS. Tonight, I raise a glass of champagne to my favorite game of all time, and break out the N64 controllers for some deathmatch.
Happy 20th anniversary, GoldenEye 007. Here’s to 20 more years.
