Never Say Goldeneye Again

The gaming public has had a strange love/hate relationship with 007 adventures since 1997. That year, a revolutionary first-person shooter came out for the N64. Goldeneye 007 also happened to be a Bond game based on the movie of the same name.

It raised expectations so much that several of us now automatically expect more from our Bond games, and are despondent when those lofty heights are not met.

There were many unique aspects to Goldeneye when it arrived. Among first-person shooters, it was rare to have a single-player campaign that involved strategy and mission objectives slightly more complicated than "get from point A to point B and blow up everything and kill everyone in between." Thanks to a really strong graphics engine, blowing up everything and killing everyone had never looked better on home consoles though. The game also had an extremely groovy soundtrack. "It's just basic Bond music," a friend of mine who was as addicted to the game as I was said.

But though that is admittedly true, the sheer variety of the soundtrack-off the top of my head I recall rock, techno, moody choirs and even some jazzy elevator music-was impressive. That the musicians managed to squeeze this quality out of the N64, the weakest of its contemporary consoles when it came to audio capabilities, made it even more so.

What really made Goldeneye stand out head and shoulders above its competition though, and gave it a life for years to come, is its 4-player deathmatch mode. "It has dorm room accessibility," as a former gamer friend who spent a lot of time blasting his buddies in his college years told me. "Four people could play in the same room all at the same time."

That feels like small potatoes, considering today's readily online consoles and computers. Four players on the same console are the bare minimum one can nowadays expect.

So why are we so disappointed with the current crop of Bond games? Almost all of them have tried to imitate Goldeneye rather than innovate. Quantum is not a bad game, but beyond its beautiful graphics, I'm not sure what it has to offer its 11-year old predecessor did not. For some, that's likely enough. "I'd probably look for the same but with better graphics," my friend answered when asked what he would want in a modern Bond. Then again, the fact he does not even recall trying any other 007 adventure since Goldeneye maybe speaks more than that part of his answer.

Goldeneye arrived at a remarkable time in the lives of many people who still play video games today: teenage hood. I recall spending entire afternoons plugging away at it with a friend or two. Heck, this is probably too geeky to admit publicly, but I'm afraid I've even themed a birthday party around a Bond tournament.

My friend's story does not seem too different. "I would spend entire weekends (at my best friend's place) playing Goldeneye […] It's the kind of game you'd pretty much never get sick of, especially playing other people."

Us gamers are perhaps at fault for expecting so much better out of each and every Bond. Surely, however, developers can try to do better too. The original company behind Goldeneye, Rareware, never tried their hand at Bond again. The next shooter they made, the N64's Perfect Dark, was the closest they ever got to achieve that level of success in the genre. Meanwhile, 007 passed between different developers.

Among the enthusiast press, the closest any 007 game got to an instant classic was 2004's Everything or Nothing. Unlike other Bond games since Goldeneye, it struck out completely different territory. Playing in third person, it combined intense action shoot-outs with Splinter Cell-like stealth elements, adding in a dash of very movie-like destructive vehicle chases. A bevy of advanced gadgets at the player's disposal also made the game arguably more Bond-like than its 1997 forebear. Since Everything though, three games have been released in the series, and two of them have seen a return to aping Goldeneye's style.

Bond games will surely continue to get made. It's way too lucrative a franchise to pass up, but I do hope developers will return to trying things differently.

In the meantime, I'll probably dust off the N64 once in a while and remember the good old days. Sure, the blocky reproduction of Brosnan's low-res scanned face looks ridiculous by modern standards, and the control scheme is archaic in comparison to dual analog, mouse plus keypad, or the Wii's remote and nunchuk, but all I need is those kick-ass tunes and I'm back in another era.