
An Oral History of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64 - ForHackernews
https://melmagazine.com/an-oral-history-of-goldeneye-007-on-the-n64-129844f1c5ab
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orev
One of the best aspects of GoldenEye multiplayer was social, _real_ social,
not in the “stream on twitch” kind of way. You had to all be in the same room,
and you could yell and scream at each other, hear people’s reactions, other
people could watch, share a few pizzas, and it just brought everyone together.
These days everyone can be in their own room in different locations, and even
with voice chat it’s just not the same. It really was the social aspect that
made it amazing.

~~~
distantsounds
you're describing literally ever multi-player game before the dawn of the
internet. it wasn't limited to just Goldeneye.

~~~
giobox
Not sure I’d agree, especially for first person shooters.

Sure, you’d been able to play Doom et al over a LAN and so on before
Goldeneye, but the intimacy of the experience when you and three close friends
are gathered around a single tiny CRT TV was something no Doom LAN deathmatch
ever matched for me. Being able to watch your fellow players in real time on
the other three quarters of the display also added a dynamic that LAN based
shooters rarely had, when every player was hidden behind their own boxy CRT.
What’s more this made the experience great even for observers who weren’t
playing - at a glance you could watch the state of the entire game and all the
players from your seat.

The many fun game modes (Golden gun, Slappers only etc) all contributed to a
party style experience that very few other multiplayer games, typically with
their much more straight laced approach to gameplay, had. Four player gameplay
seems quaint now, but it was a very rare feature in console games prior to the
n64, and of course almost always required additional hardware to add the extra
ports. I suspect a majority of Playstation owners never even saw a MultiTap
adapter, let alone owned one, given how few games could take advantage of it.

Let’s not forget the cost angle here either - while many of us may have been
lucky enough to have participated in Doom LAN games, it was a pretty expensive
(and technical) undertaking beyond the reach of many people, especially kids,
in the mid 90s. Goldeneye was much more affordable and is all the better for
it.

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jdmoreira
I wish I could go back to the days where our group would spend all our free
time playing split screen GoldenEye at my friend's basement. If you were
privileged enough (which we were) the 90s were a great time to be a child.

~~~
jgalt212
having friends, access to a basement and enough cash to purchase Goldeneye, or
a friend with the cash, sets a very low bar for the term "privileged".

~~~
pjmorris
'Privileged' is very much a matter of what you're comparing against. In the
90's, about 25% of the world's population didn't have electricity [0], let
alone game consoles.

[0]
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/eg.elc.accs.zs](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/eg.elc.accs.zs)

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petepete
> will be the game’s 21st birthday, allowing Bond to finally taste one of his
> revered cocktails

Legal drinking age is 18 in the UK, I'm amazed it's as high as 21 in the US.

~~~
DanBC
Legal drinking age is _five_ in the UK. It's 18 to buy alcohol.

~~~
Jaruzel
Yup, and most savvy parents slowly acclimatise their children to alcohol by
allowing them wine or beer on occasion with a meal when they are in their
teens. Done right, by the time the child hits 18 they don't go crazy with
booze, and treat it with respect.

~~~
GW150914
Given rates of alcoholism and alcohol related disease and injury in the UK,
I’d say that’s not working.

~~~
mediocrejoker
Wouldn't the more relevant statistic be the relative rates compared to the US?

~~~
GW150914
Approximately 9.6 per 100,000 alcohol related deaths in the US per year, and
approximately 14.3 per 100,000 per year in the UK circa 2014. This fits with
WHO data from 2003-2005 showing that Americans on average consumed between
7.5-9.9 liters of pure alcohol while on average people in the UK consumed more
than 12.5. It also fits with much higher rates of cirrhosis of the liver per
capita in the UK, as well as hospital admissions related to alcohol (which are
on the rise in the UK).

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adrianparsons
I'm impressed with how small the dev team was, how much fun they seemed to
have working, and how much freedom and creativity they had. I wonder if we
stifle innovation by building crazy large hierarchies.

~~~
lobotryas
Even with all the advantages they had (including, arguably, being single),
they still had their own deathmarch (100 hour weeks) at the end. I wonder if
it's at all possible to make video game development sane when you have a
publisher?

Maybe when we create an AI that can test games for us.

~~~
kossae
Is testing the biggest time sink in the process? I’ve always wondered, despite
having obviously complex architecture, why game development cycles had such
crunch times. I knew it was based on publisher deadlines and such, but figured
the bottleneck would be more in development time rather than testing. If the
latter is the case, given the progress of OpenAI, I could see that being a
plausible solution.

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louthy
> What emerged was a masterpiece that changed the industry and set many
> standards still seen in first-person shooters today.

Erm, what? Quake already existed at that point. I always thought Goldeneye was
poor compared to Quake, which was really mind blowing at the time.

~~~
soneil
Most my memories of Goldeneye involve having 4 people stuffed on a couch,
cheap beer, pretending we weren't looking at each other's screens.

Quake was a blast, but we weren't all in the same room, let alone the same
couch.

I don't think comparing the games themselves directly really encompasses the
difference in the playing experience.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Indeed, if you wanted something that felt like the best of both worlds I'd go
with the original Halo, but of course that didn't come along until much later.

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d3sandoval
If you're interested in other oral histories and video game stories, I highly
recommend Read Only Memory [1].

I've been diving deep into some of the articles there lately and am excited to
see what else they come up with, given how so many of these stories are locked
away within the mind of a few game devs.

[1] [https://readonlymemory.vg/](https://readonlymemory.vg/)

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gwern
> So we showed them we had all the Bonds… Well, soon after that we got a memo
> saying we couldn’t have all the Bonds, because only the GoldenEye actors had
> signed off on the digital rights to their likeness to be used in games, not
> the older movies. > > Edmonds: So in order to represent Sean Connery, Roger
> Moore or Timothy Dalton in the game we would have needed to do a deal with
> their individual agents to get the rights. And unfortunately, it would have
> been too expensive. > > Doak: They particularly said Connery would want
> money, and then if Connery wanted money and got money, the others would want
> money as well. So they got taken out.

Tragedy of the anti-commons.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Almost like a prisoners' dilemma - either one gets money or none of them do.

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xivzgrev
So many awesome memories with this one. I liked how each multiplayer game had
a theme: mines, pistols, etc. So you had to adjust playing style but you also
got to choose. Led to a lot of variety.

Sadly there were only so many mines you could lay before the first ones
started disappearing.

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dev_dull
> _A lot of the cheats were added by the code team_

I’m still amazed at how long it took for the cheat codes to become known. I
remember scouring the early internet and finding nothing but guides. It wasn’t
for years before I saw they existed. Other games had their codes published in
magazines almost the same day they were released.

~~~
wingerlang
Were there other codes than the time based? Because if I am not wrong, they
would be found by most people (given that they beat levels quick enough).

~~~
Jach
There were button sequences you could use, they worked in multiplayer, and in
singleplayer didn't count as "cheating" it like activating a time-unlocked
cheat did.

[http://nincheats.net/index.php?sys=n64&game=Goldeneye%20007](http://nincheats.net/index.php?sys=n64&game=Goldeneye%20007)

