
Goldeneye 64's inspirational startup story - alexkiwi
http://www.alexbaldwin.com/goldeneye/
======
whalesalad
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.

~~~
Hannan
>> 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.

~~~
smoyer
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!

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k-mcgrady
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.

------
rrbrambley
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.

~~~
anthonyb
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).

~~~
jrockway
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.

God that was a great game.

~~~
anthonyb
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 :)

------
dhconnelly
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."

Talk about a non sequitur.

~~~
Jonanin
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.

~~~
benihana
> _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?

~~~
dhconnelly
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.

~~~
robryan
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?

~~~
michaelgrafl
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.

~~~
ashray
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.

~~~
Qualman
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.

~~~
michaelgrafl
I agree. It devalues the article because it becomes part of an agenda instead
of standing on its own.

------
jivatmanx
Proximity Mines under the ammo spawns. Invisible room in facility, entrance in
Temple. Race to choose oddjob.

~~~
petitmiam
Oddjob was banned pretty early on in my family.

~~~
anthonyb
My house rules were "Pick any character you like, I'll kill you anyway" :)

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alexkiwi
Proximity mines on temple, that almost never happened. Thankfully that one
developer stood for what's right and made our childhoods that much better.

------
bittersweet
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]

[1]:
[http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_golden...](http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_goldeneye.html)

------
doomlaser
For those interested in more development anecdotes, the game's director did a
full postmortem at this year's GDC Europe:
[http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-
Gold...](http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Classic-Postmortem-
GoldenEye.php)

------
eru
Alas, the article is a bit thin on the details.

~~~
hughlomas
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...](http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/tough-times-on-the-road-to-
starcraft)).

------
timjahn
Best game ever. So many fun times with my buddies playing the 4 screen multi-
player, throwing proximity mines on every spawn spot in the Facility.

~~~
trevelyan
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.

~~~
anthonyb
Heh, you even have your HN account named after a 007 character :)

------
DanBC
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.

~~~
nikatwork
> The N64 was a peculiar sweet spot for games and I'm not sure why.

That's arguably age-related nostalgia. I feel the same way about the Super
Nintendo instead of the N64.

<http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1322>

~~~
ekianjo
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.

~~~
lmm
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.

~~~
icefox
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.

~~~
DanBC
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.

------
cloudwalking
Temple in Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer game ever.

Tangential to OP's article, <http://console.fm> is awesome.

~~~
alexkiwi
Haha thank you, it's a really great project to work on.

~~~
tejaswiy
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.

------
avar
I'd be just as interested in how Rare went from doing Goldeneye 64 to making
what seem to be relatively mediocre games today.

~~~
DanBC
Pre MS buyout:

GoldenEye 64, Blast Corps, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-
Kazooie, and Perfect Dark.

After MS buyout?

~~~
throwaway1979
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.

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alexkiwi
Anyone interested in putting together a game in SF?

~~~
chadnickbok
Yes, yes we are.

 _Edit_ : And by that I mean you should take point and make it happen ;)

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mweibel
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)

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ae7
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).

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smokinjoe
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.

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macspoofing
It was still a bad idea to base your game on movie ip.

