Before GoldenEye 007, nobody thought console first-person shooters worked. Doom and Quake were PC games. The idea that you could play a compelling FPS with an analogue stick, on a television, at a table with four friends, was not on anyone’s roadmap. Rare built the roadmap in 1997 and left it as their definitive contribution to gaming history.
The game was made by a team of mostly first-time developers, adapted from a film that had already been in cinemas for two years, on hardware that had no business running it. The result was one of the best-reviewed games of the decade and a piece of cultural infrastructure that became shorthand for a particular kind of teenage social experience.
The Campaign
The campaign is underrated in nostalgia coverage that focuses exclusively on the multiplayer. GoldenEye’s single-player missions across three difficulty levels are genuinely excellent: each difficulty adds objectives rather than just increasing damage values, which means the Agent, Secret Agent, and 00 Agent runs through the same levels are different experiences. Harder modes require more deliberate movement, more objective management, and more tolerance for the game’s unforgiving checkpoint system.
The Dam. The Facility. The Cradle. The level names carry weight for anyone who played the game seriously. The Facility bathroom speedrun remains a piece of gaming culture: a mission so well known that its optimal route was being discussed in schoolyards before YouTube existed.
The enemy AI, for 1997, was remarkable: guards would run for alarms, call for backup, react to suppressed versus unsuppressed fire, and take contextually appropriate cover. The game still plays better than its technology suggests.
The Multiplayer
The four-player split-screen multiplayer was where GoldenEye defined a generation. The screen division reduced each player’s view to a quarter of the television, which on a 28-inch CRT meant a view roughly the size of a postcard. Glancing at your opponent’s quadrant to find them, the act of screen-watching, was semi-sanctioned cheating that everyone practised and nobody admitted to.
Oddjob was banned. Everybody knows this. In a game with no ruleset document beyond what friends agreed, the squat character whose hitbox sat below the auto-aim was universally outlawed without needing to be written down. The emergence of informal social contracts from competitive play is one of gaming’s recurring and charming phenomena.
How It Holds Up
GoldenEye was released on Nintendo Switch Online in early 2023 with online multiplayer. The experience is a faithful recreation of the original, complete with the frame rate drops, and it is both exactly what it was and a reminder of how far shooters have come technically.
The controls have not aged. Playing with an analogue stick of the era’s specification, mapping one stick to aim, is a friction point that the modern ports cannot fully address. But the mission design, the atmosphere, and the particular feel of those corridors remain intact.
The memories are better than the game. The game is still good.
