Renowned Classics: GoldenEye 007

Doom may have been first to the party, but GoldenEye soon showed up and shovelled all the cake into its mouth, won Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and passed out on the couch with a lampshade on its head.


With a remake for the Wii just around the corner, I decided to take a close look at the game that defined the shooter genre. Doom may have been first to the party, but GoldenEye soon showed up and shovelled all the cake into its mouth, won Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and passed out on the couch with a lampshade on its head.

Is it still as playable now as it was back in its day? Does it stand up to the modern first person shooter? And do Goldeneye's little siblings have something to learn from the granddaddy of the console shooter? Come hither, and we shall examine the evidence.

Oh such evidence shall we examine.

Its success is undeniable. Every gamer who can rightfully call themselves a gamer has played GoldenEye 007. It spawned spiritual successors in Perfect Dark and the TimeSplitters series, and a number of other games followed the franchise such as Tomorrow Never Dies, Agent Under Fire and Rogue Agent. None of these approached the success of GoldenEye. Why is this so? Were they simply of lower quality? In my view, Perfect Dark (also by Rare) improved on Goldeneye in every way. Single player, multiplayer, controls, weapons, you name it.

I aschuuuuuuuume that you have no rebuttals?

Yet it is not as renowned by gamers the world over to the extent that GoldenEye is, and I have my theories as to why.

First of all; timing. In 1997 GoldenEye was one hell of a game. It offered something that not many games could, and set the benchmark for all shooting games to come. So why should it be judged by 2010 standards? When you examine a classic and the reasons why it is considered to be one in the first place, you don't think about how the controls are horribly dated (though revolutionary on the game's release), or that compared to Crysis it's butt-ugly.

Boy, is it ugly.

You judge it on what it did in its time - and what it did was awesome. First person shooters were relatively new; it was a simpler time. A time when shooters weren't just restricted to greys, browns and displays of machismo. GoldenEye was the first to bring all the elements of what we would now consider to be staples of the genre into one neat little package. Who would have expected all that from a game based on a movie?

Despite the fact that it was a last-minute addition, GoldenEye's multiplayer is legendary. It was the first ever first-person shooter to have split-screen multiplayer. Remember those late nights you spent with friends where you smeared your greasy hands over the broken control stick (thanks, Mario Party) and argued over who was looking at what screen (and of course Oddjob was one of the first ever examples of balance issues.)

It's clear that it was not just the merit of the maps, weapons, wide selection of characters or modes that established the GoldenEye experience, but the players. Especially in a time when same-room gaming was actually common.

So in saying this, it becomes clear as to why other games in the series haven't received the same level of acclaim. They weren't able to do what GoldenEye did in its heyday. It created a standard for games of the first-person shooter genre by successfully combining a number of essential elements. Not that what other games did was sub-par; I honestly enjoyed Rogue Agent for example, as well as Everything or Nothing (though this was a third-person shooter.)

It's simply that they couldn't live up to the expectations of a game that laid the foundation for what all other games of the genre would be built on.

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