Pretty cool to see so many fellow hackers with similar positive memories of this game. It's pretty indicative of the age group here on HN. For reference, I'm 23.
This was one of the greatest games ever made, no doubt. I've actually never been able to relate to a lot of my buddies who can game for hours on end. Starcraft, WoW, etc.. bore me after 30 minutes.
Goldeneye on the other hand ... I could have easily died from starvation without the parental supervision.
Anyhow, back to the original post. It's interesting to me that the original team had no idea what they were doing. I still look back on apps or things I built years ago, lacking absolutely any idea of what I was doing, and being amazed at how successful or great they ended up. Inversely, sometimes the product or thing I spent the most time agonizing over ended up being a total flop. More and more I am learning that you just gotta side with the majority of the 80/20, stick to your gut feelings, and jam jam jam to get that puppy out the door.
It's always tricky to find that perfect place between being a bootstrapped/scaffolded/barebones MVP product and a well-thought out, carefully designed product. I'm glad the Rare team managed to hit it with Goldeneye, they're an inspiration.
>> It's pretty indicative of the age group here on HN. For reference, I'm 23.
I'm not sure exactly what it says, but I'm a decade older than you, and I lost countless days to this game. The best opponent I had was four years older than me!
I don't quite understand the love for the four player multi though. It seemed unplayably choppy to me with with that many opponents, but I never did get that expansion pack that sticks in the front. Also didn't care for the limited view range. But heads up multi-player... fantastic.
I'm another decade older and I lost countless lives playing this game ... My (then) 9th grade son, his friend and his friend's little sister consistently ended each life just seconds after it began!
I can remember having trouble with Silo, that bloody 7:00 minute time limit. After a while I realised that I was having trouble aiming and had a big blind spot in one eye where the crosshair would normally be.
I went to bed pretty quickly after that - my vision came back, thankfully :)
Edit: This was about 3am, for the record, after I'd been playing for about 12 hours or so.
I've never been a big gamer. I have a short attention span and lose interest too quickly, but I loved Goldeneye 64. The N64 was my first games console (I got it soon after it came out, I think I was 7 at the time) and Goldeneye was the game that was bundled with it. In general there were some great N64 games. The were the obvious ones like Super Mario, Mission Impossible was another good one, but my favourite was Diddy Kong Racing. It was the only game I've ever got 'addicted' too. The N64's also one of the few pieces of tech I've held on to. Every now and then I hook it up and get another few weeks of fun out of it.
Power Weapons in the Stack. I owned the top floor.
Immediately prior to reading this, I was writing about how non-game developers can indeed bring a unique perspective to the table when developing games. This is definitely an inspirational story and helpful in reaffirming my thoughts. Thanks for sharing.
One of the things that I liked about Goldeneye was just how damn many multiplayer modes there were. eg. The Klobb was a crappy gun (low damage, huge cone of fire), but switch to one-shot-kills and it's suddenly an uber weapon :)
My favorite modes were one shot kills with knives or slappers only, power weapons with health cranked up, or anything involving prox mines :>
I haven't played it for years now, and I'm not sure how easy it is to get N64 consoles now, but if you want something similar, TimeSplitters for the Gamecube had very similar gameplay (and a lot more options, including bots and fully customisable loadouts).
I liked the remote mines a lot more. You could go hide in the vent in facility and look at other people's screens to see where they were. When they got to the right place, bam, you detonated the mine.
The "problem" with remote mines was that you could throw a mine and press A+B at the same time while it was still in mid-air. BOOM! Instant detonation! So you'd be able to just insta-kill people who weren't expecting it.
Eventually it balanced out because everyone would be a lot more careful about getting close and going around corners, but ... let's just say that raegquits are a lot more fun in-person :)
Yes! Left joystick + R + left C, twirl around and end up back in the vent. Plant a mine at the spawn point and hope you don't end up there when you die before someone else does!
I enjoyed reading this until I reached the end: "I still have nightmares about playing Temple and not being able to find the proximity mines. If you like James Bond, lattes, startups and design, you'd enjoy my tweets."
Yeah, what the hell? I don't get why people beg for followers at the end of their blog posts. It just leaves a sour taste in my mouth after what would have been a great reading experience.
>I don't get why people beg for followers at the end of their blog posts.
You don't understand why people promote themselves? You made it to the end of the blog post, which likely indicates that you enjoyed the content. Why wouldn't he say "hey follow me on twitter so that if I write another post that doesn't make it to HN front page, you can hear about it," to try to get some extra followers? Would you prefer he ask you to follow him at the beginning of the post?
There's a huge "Follow so-and-so" Twitter button immediately following the writing, so I'm pretty sure that the corny self-promotion didn't need to be part of the article itself. I read lots of articles where this happens, and it's always jarring.
I'm about as aware of those buttons as I am of individual grasshoppers in tall grass during summer, i.e. not very. They're everywhere, and I hardly ever want to press them. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
The suggestion text has been shown to work better than just placing a button. Building up your personal brand can be worth a lot in the long run, so why not?
I don't like being manipulated. Every time I see a "You should follow me on Twitter" kinda thing I make it a point to not follow the author, or maybe even unfollow them.
Holding your readership in higher regards than a meaningless metric can be worth a lot in the long run, too.
Manipulated ? He just said in other words - "Hey follow me on twitter if you want to stay updated". Is that manipulation according to you ?
I actually looked for the twitter button on his site so that I could follow him - since I did enjoy the post and would like to see more from him. Didn't feel manipulated though.
I think the idea is that, if I like what he has to say, I'll just do it. He doesn't have to ask, and doing so _inside_ the post shifts the whole thing from inspirational anecdote, to well-written justification of why you should follow his Twitter.
The way he embedded the suggestion seemed contrived and inorganic to me. If some one puts a link to their Twitter account beneath a post, I know what to do if I want to follow them because of their output.
If I have confidence in my output I will trust my audience to find the right degree of involvement they want to have with me. No need to push it. Maybe I'm weird that way, but I think the OP knew exactly what he was doing, and stuff like that rubs me the wrong way because I find it undignified, harshly put.
There was a bug that allowed you to get back up into the ventilation duct through which you enter the level (in single player mode). You have to go into the bathroom stall, crouch on the toilet, and spin around a few times IIRC. Once you're up there, no one's getting you out until you run out of ammo.
haha, I def remember having a "no oddjob" rule. And if you did pick oddjob, lord have mercy, cuz everyone was comin after your ass and nobody else! For whatever reason, I would irrationally target anyone playing as boris as well...
This article seemed very familiar, and I found the original article where a lot of the quotes/text came from, 'The Making of Goldeneye' from may 2011 [1]
Someone throwing some quotes into a reddit-esque nostalgia post and topping it off with his name in size 40 font hardly qualifies as an article. When I first saw the title I was hoping for something along the lines of the recent Starcraft article (http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-s...).
My favorite trick is that the spawn sequences were not actually random. They would cycle predictably and only randomize if someone was too close to the respawn point.
Especially in levels like the bunker, if you hovered just a breadth out of distance in a two-player game, it was possible to wrack up multiple kills very easily and would often take an equally experienced player to even have a chance of making it to the nearest weapon in time.
I really loved the menu screen showing you what levels you'd done and what difficulty level you'd done them on. Simple, efficient.
It took me weeks to realise that the cut-scene graphics were actually useful and not just fluff. They often provided hints and tips or let you know about enemies.
There's a bunch of stuff still in the rom code that isn't accessible from the game - the hidden island; some glitchy levels. And there's some bits left over from the "notorious" but removed "put your face in the game" mode. (Which used the GB camera to map face photos onto game models for multiplayer but got removed after a mass shooting.)
I loved the train; I loved the tunnel in the damn. I hated trying to keep the bloody hostages alive on the boat. The first few times I set the alarm off were scary.
This was an amazing game. The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why.
The N64 was a very poor system for games. You had a few very good ones and a lot of crap. The Playstation was a way more versatile system with great games in all genres. Hell, even the Saturn was more complete in terms of software.
The N64 had fewer games and more expensive than the competition, but the quality standard was far higher (there was a whole lot of unbelievably crap shovelware produced for playstation) and it was a more powerful system; the best N64 games (of which Goldeneye was certainly one) were by and large better than the best Playstation games.
In "top 10 games of all time" lists the only Playstation game you tend to see is FFVII, which deserves its place but is more a triumph of storytelling than gameplay; from the N64 Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye both regularly feature. It was only towards the end of its life that we saw Playstation games comparable to those in technical terms (heck, while it's been overshadowed by later instalments I remember being blown away by Rogue Squadron back in '97 or so), and I don't think we ever saw the equal of Perfect Dark until the next console generation and Halo.
Besides FF, Metal Gear Solid is another game for the PS1 that I have seen pop up on top 10 lists. Both the N64 and the PS1 had a range of good games for their system. Tomb Raider, Gran Turismo, Spyro, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night all come to mind as quality games that you could pick up today and enjoy for the PS1. But really these days you can pick up the systems for pocket change ($20 tops?) so if you are a gamer owning both to experience the best in both systems seems like a no brainer.
PS1 had some great games. Obviously Gran Turismo needs to be mentioned - it was important in the development of 'realistic' driving simulations.
IMO the original is much much harder than the follow-ups. Those licence tests were hard. (And a great part of the game play that they only really realised in much later incarnations, that tiny short challenge had the "just one more try" feature that's important for good addictive game play.)
Tomb raider is an interesting choice. It's a huge franchise, and very very popular. Some parts of the games were really good. But the games did suffer from unnecessary bugginess. Which is weird because that company produced other great games that were not full of bugs.
Owning many systems is, obviously, something that people who love games should be doing. BomberMan on SNES is god-like multiplayer; MicroMachines on Genesis / megadrive is the best version; etc.
It's a shame that as the hardware (and the storage medium) is dying that people have to rely on emulation. Mostly this is great. But for some systems it's not, and for all systems it's not legal.
It'd be nice if there was a simple way to pay for playing roms, and if people could work on emulators for dead systems without facing scary legal stuff.
I was talking about the variety of games available on PS1 rather than simply which system had more top10 games, which is highly subjective. The PS1 hand thousands of games available and if you were into imports you could get your hands on japanese gems as well, literally quadrupling the games available for the system. There was no other system like it (the closest in that regard being the Saturn). The N64 never reached that kind of "standard" status and therefore the offering and third party support was limited at best. As to whether the N64 was a more powerful system, yeah, it may have been, but on consoles we all know that software makes the different more than hardware.
There's a clear reason why the N64 sold way less than the PS1: it was just a much better deal to get a PS1 if you wanted to play lots of different games. The market is not stupid :)
>I was talking about the variety of games available on PS1 rather than simply which system had more top10 games, which is highly subjective.
Sure, but I think it extends to top100 or even top1000 games; my point was that the N64 has more of the high end. Unless you're a video game reviewer or something you're probably going to play <50 games over the life of a system, and for most people who play a variety of games (sure, not if you're a dedicated fan of a single genre) I think the N64 top 50 beats the PS1 top 50.
The PS1 undeniably had more third-party support and far more games, and sure that means more variety. But if you're talking about whether something's a "poor system for games", I'm more bothered about having the best games than having a wide variety of genres. (Hell, I count the Game Gear as a "good system")
>There's a clear reason why the N64 sold way less than the PS1: it was just a much better deal to get a PS1 if you wanted to play lots of different games. The market is not stupid :)
Careful. By that logic the Wii is the best of the current generation (and I don't think either of us believes that).
There were some excellent games. 1080; Super Mario 64; Golden Eye; some of the Zelda games. These aren't just "very good", these are "among the best", and they are still very very good games.
I'll admit there were also some real duffers. Superman, that claymation fighting game, etc.
Sega Saturn has been mentioned, and that had some great games despite some serious flaws with the system. Sega Rally on Saturn is almost perfect, even though you only have 3 cars and a handful of tracks.
It was the first console with 3D, and it was the last generation before 3d games started to become very expensive to make. This caused an explosion of new gameplay ideas.
Perfect Dark was like a reskin of GoldenEye huh? That was awesome too. My cousins and I used to scare ourselves shitless by turning on bots to highest difficulty, giving them max speed and only tranquilizer guns. They'd still pwn you!
This is brilliant. Thanks so much for doing an API! As much as I like web apps, I'd hate to keep a tab open for the entire day in my browser. I'll go build a simple native mac app that sits in the toolbar and plays music.
Much of the main talent who led the GoldenEye team at Rare (David Doak, Karl Hilton, Steve Ellis, Graeme Norgate) left to form their own studio, Free Radical Design[1]. FRD went on to release the Timesplitters games to good success, but later hit trouble and have now been bought out by CryTek and renamed CryTek UK.
Martin Hollis, the other senior member of the team also left for pastures new after working on Perfect Dark.
I'm sure Rare still has a lot of brilliant hard working team members, but the main drivers of GoldenEye have long since gone.
[1] Disclaimer: I used to work at Free Radical at one point.
I really enjoyed Viva Piniata and Kameo! Both were extremely high quality.
What is amazing about Viva Piniata was that my retired mom (afraid of turning on the computer) got interested seeing me play and started playing herself! She ended up unlocking every single feature/award in the game, and this led her to play other Animal Crossing on the GameCube. I got her the first iPad when it came out and she is now essentially a regular computer user! While Viva Piniata might not have been a commercial success, I know one life it changed and I'd bet there are a lot more.
Frankly, I wish the world had more daring developers/game companies/people. The situation with Rare isn't a good one as your quip points out. Sadly, no matter how artistically awesome your games are, without commercial success, you cannot survive. This leads to a world of xbox games where pretty much every game is a shooter. IMHO, that is why tablets are kicking console gamings behind. It seems more creative titles for tablets (and perhaps the indie game section of xbox live) than for the xbox today.
It's been such a great game, I lost countless hours as well.
They redid the original Goldeneye for Wii and sadly I bought it. It's a horrible remake. Aiming with pointing using the Wii Remote is really hard and turning around takes ages, but this isn't the worst thing. They changed the multiplayer game mode: You can't pick up other weapons as you could in the 64 version - you have to chose in the beginning which weapons you'd like...
I always loved this in the 64 version (proximity mines..oh yes :D)
I spent a ton of time playing this game as a kid. I remember the game being flawless as far as gameplay, and those were good times.
Point: Maybe more mainstream games should be created by inexperienced teams to compete with the 6-month Call of Duty plot change cycle (i.e. same shit different day).
That game was in the top 5 N64 games sold, routinely hitting the top spot for roughly 3 years [and perhaps a little change]. It was an incredible run, I remember following it in EGM.
This was one of the greatest games ever made, no doubt. I've actually never been able to relate to a lot of my buddies who can game for hours on end. Starcraft, WoW, etc.. bore me after 30 minutes.
Goldeneye on the other hand ... I could have easily died from starvation without the parental supervision.
Anyhow, back to the original post. It's interesting to me that the original team had no idea what they were doing. I still look back on apps or things I built years ago, lacking absolutely any idea of what I was doing, and being amazed at how successful or great they ended up. Inversely, sometimes the product or thing I spent the most time agonizing over ended up being a total flop. More and more I am learning that you just gotta side with the majority of the 80/20, stick to your gut feelings, and jam jam jam to get that puppy out the door.
It's always tricky to find that perfect place between being a bootstrapped/scaffolded/barebones MVP product and a well-thought out, carefully designed product. I'm glad the Rare team managed to hit it with Goldeneye, they're an inspiration.