The Nintendo 64’s GoldenEye 007 - or GoldenEye 64, as it’s often known - is seen as one of the system’s all-time classics. Aug. 25, 2018, will be the game’s 21st birthday (allowing Bond to finally taste one of his revered cocktails), so we reached out to the people who played, reviewed and created the game to see how it all came together, way back in 1997. From the multiplayer being added as an afterthought to the game almost having every Bond actor ever, the game you and your buddies logged hours on - paintballing in the Stack or shooting Boris in the balls - was almost something very, very different.
I, too, played this game a lot when it came out – specifically, the multiplayer. It’s one of those games that defined a console generation.
Being British, Bond could taste those cocktails 3 years ago at the age of 18…
Being British, he would have been able to console himself by having a pint with a meal in a pub the moment he reached sixteen.
Or he could just have asked his parents to mix him a martini at home at his fifth birthday party, which is also quite legal.
Golden Eye was cool, but my intro to console FPSs was it’s unofficial sequel, Perfect Dark
Which was an utterly beautiful and engaging game for it’s time.
I have a hard time calling “generation defining” a game which, like all FPS games, boils down to, basically, a game mechanic of pointing at things – so it works best with a controller meant to… point at things; that’s not joypad, but usually a mouse (and I’m not aware of mouse for N64… PlayStation 1 does have official one, for FPS, point’n’click adventures, or RTS games) .
Well, at least for most FPS games, there are also subgenres of lightgun games (but I’m not aware of a lighgun for N64 either) and Descent-like FPS games, with which two analog sticks are the best (so… not N64 controller; but Dual Shock works great)
It maybe defined N64, but perhaps not console generation …FPS games are not very “consolish” genre / they often have the “wrong” controller…
(and I’m saying this as someone who games almost exclusively on a console)
Games which IMHO defined that generation are titles like Tekken, Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo, Silent Hill, Wipeouts (not sure which one
), Resident Evils (likewise 
)…
Edited 2018-09-01 01:37 UTC