25 Years Ago, GoldenEye Proved FPS Games Worked On Consoles

Since the days of Doom, PC gamers proclaimed their supremacy over the unwashed console masses in a number of genres—strategy games, western RPGs, and most notably first-person shooters. The argument was that underpowered consoles couldn’t handle the speed and precision that these games required, especially with their clumsy control pads. But then, courtesy of some very unlikely parties, everything changed. The release of GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 a quarter century ago on Aug. 25 brought FPS gaming to the TV set in a big way. Let’s open the case and see how it happened.

Spy Games

For a while, James Bond was one of the biggest—and longest-running—movie franchises in the world, dependably dropping new installments every few years. The role of the titular agent would pass through a number of actors, but the late 80s saw a gap with Timothy Dalton leaving. But by 1994 the studio was deep in production on the next flick in the series and the first to star Pierce Brosnan as Bond—GoldenEye.

Past Bond movies had seen tie-in games of dubious quality, mostly for UK microcomputers but a few for American consoles. Most notable was Parker Brothers’ mediocre 1983 shooter for Atari and Colecovision, so not a very high water mark to aspire to.

Rare had just completed Donkey Kong Country, a smash hit game that pushed the aging Super Nintendo to its graphical limits, so when they talked to Nintendo about the license the general assumption was that they’d do it as a side-scrolling action game, much like 1992’s James Bond 007: The Duel. But Rare director Martin Hollis had other ideas. He’d heard about the new console Nintendo was working on, which could push polygonal graphics and boasted a unique controller with an analog stick, and he wanted to make the Bond game for that machine instead.

There was only one problem: the Nintendo 64 wouldn’t release until 1996 in the United States, and the company didn’t even have complete development hardware. With GoldenEye the movie hitting theaters in 1995, the whole point of a movie tie-in game was lost. But for some reason Eon Productions, Rare, and Nintendo not only let it slide, but gave the tiny development team—fewer than 10 people—all of the access and resources they needed to create something truly special.

Q’s Gadgets

There was no framework for designing GoldenEye. First-person shooters were still in their infancy on PCs, but the genre was evolving quickly. And because the technical specs for the N64 hadn’t been finalized, Hollis and his team had no idea what they’d actually be able to pack into the cartridge. This was compounded by the fact that most of the crew had never developed a game before, coming to Rare straight out of college and ready for a challenge.

Without a development kit, the team ran their test code on a Silicon Graphics Challenge XL, a massively expensive behemoth that they’d used for the rendered graphics on DKC. 

The initial gameplay prototypes were inspired by arcade light gun games Virtua Cop and Time Crisis, both of which used blocky polygonal 3D to create an immersive world with lots of visual depth. Because the Nintendo 64 didn’t have a light gun controller, the team needed to figure out how to aim smoothly. Even worse, Rare didn’t even have a prototype N64 gamepad, so they made do with a modified Sega Saturn one that approximated the experience.

Even with all of these issues, the game’s creation went reasonably smoothly. Once the basic functionality was working—movement in 3D space and hit detection—what was left was just fleshing it out with environments, characters, and weapons. With no clear guidance from the licensors, Rare’s team went wild, throwing in every actor to have played Bond, villains from past movies, and intricately detailed levels based on the GoldenEye movie’s real sets.

They were having fun, but towards the end of the development process, things got more intense. Crunch was consistent, with many team members clocking in 100-hour weeks as they struggled to fit in everything they wanted. That was aided by the release date getting pushed multiple times, so their work was split between essential functionality and the legion of weird features and cheats that made the game even more fun. 

Four Square

One of the team’s most important decisions happened without any corporate oversight at all. When they learned the Nintendo 64 would ship with four controller ports, their minds immediately turned to multiplayer. Without even asking if it was something Nintendo wanted, they briskly coded a split-screen deathmatch mode that would become the game’s biggest selling point.

Engine programmer Martin Edmonds worked up the code to get the game working in four-part harmony before multiplayer had even been discussed, correctly thinking that showing the biggest technical hurdle had already been handled would make it easier to sell. When the team revealed that they had functional deathmatch play to both management and Nintendo, it was an immediate hit. 

Home video games had obviously had competitive modes before—the fighting game boom of the 90s let players punch and kick each other with impunity—but the four-player split-screen of GoldenEye was something that felt totally new. It took the LAN or dial-up Internet-style play of games like Doom and made it more social and more immediate. It also showed that consoles could do FPS games if they started from the ground up and focused on what they were good at, rather than trying to imitate what was successful on PCs.

The Spy Who Loved Me

GoldenEye was a huge and immediate hit. Nintendo wasn’t initially sure of how well the game would do, so they only manufactured two million units. Those sold out immediately—the N64’s release schedule was sparse, to put it politely, and console owners were thirsty for content. GoldenEye would end up selling eight million copies, a massive number for a console that sold 32 million units total. That means one in every four N64 owners bought one.

Nintendo obviously wanted to capitalize on that success and got Rare started on Perfect Dark, an original franchise first-person shooter starring a female secret agent investigating an extraterrestrial conspiracy. It refined and improved on the elements that made GoldenEye great and sold acceptably, but by 2000 when the game was released the N64 was already showing its age. Requiring players to purchase the console’s memory-increasing “Expansion Pak” to access the single-player campaign didn’t help.

The real successor to GoldenEye came the next year, as Halo: Combat Evolved would become the Xbox’s first real must-have title by offering the same tightly tuned shooting action and four-player split-screen, but transplanted to a compelling sci-fi universe. From there, the floodgates opened, and shooter franchises became a must-have for every new system. But people have kept playing GoldenEye for a quarter century, some even keeping their N64 around just for marathon sessions of couch deathmatch, slappers only.