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 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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
whalesalad|13 years ago
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|13 years ago
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.
anthonyb|13 years ago
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.
k-mcgrady|13 years ago
rrbrambley|13 years ago
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|13 years ago
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).
thornofmight|13 years ago
dhconnelly|13 years ago
Talk about a non sequitur.
Jonanin|13 years ago
jivatmanx|13 years ago
petitmiam|13 years ago
function_seven|13 years ago
alexholehouse|13 years ago
dcpdx|13 years ago
ImprovedSilence|13 years ago
alexkiwi|13 years ago
bittersweet|13 years ago
[1]: http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921602/the_making_of_golden...
doomlaser|13 years ago
eru|13 years ago
hughlomas|13 years ago
timjahn|13 years ago
trevelyan|13 years ago
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.
DanBC|13 years ago
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|13 years ago
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
soup10|13 years ago
joshschreuder|13 years ago
cloudwalking|13 years ago
Tangential to OP's article, http://console.fm is awesome.
whalesalad|13 years ago
RandallBrown|13 years ago
alexkiwi|13 years ago
jrajav|13 years ago
avar|13 years ago
NickPollard|13 years ago
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.
DanBC|13 years ago
GoldenEye 64, Blast Corps, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo-Kazooie, and Perfect Dark.
After MS buyout?
alexkiwi|13 years ago
chadnickbok|13 years ago
Edit: And by that I mean you should take point and make it happen ;)
mweibel|13 years ago
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)
ae7|13 years ago
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).
smokinjoe|13 years ago
macspoofing|13 years ago