GoldenEye 007 and Four-Player Split Screen

If you ever argued over who got the top left corner of the screen, you were probably playing GoldenEye 007, a first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64 based on the 1995 James Bond movie GoldenEye. It came out in North America on August 25, 1997. Rare made it and Nintendo published it. It had a solid single-player mode, but most people remember the four-player split screen, where friends sat around one TV and tried to take each other out. It sold more than 8 million copies, and for a lot of people it was the first shooter they played with friends in the same room.

A movie game nobody expected

Games based on movies usually weren't very good, and GoldenEye came out two years after the film, when the hype had mostly worn off. Expectations were low. Instead, it became one of the most loved games on the system.

The game was directed by Martin Hollis, who had worked as a programmer on the Killer Instinct arcade game. GoldenEye was first suggested as a 2D side-scrolling game for the Super Nintendo, but Hollis pitched a 3D shooter instead. The team started in January 1995 and spent about two and a half years on it, with a budget of around $2 million.

Most of the team had never made a game before, which makes it a little ridiculous how much they got right.

Why was GoldenEye multiplayer so popular?

GoldenEye multiplayer was popular because it let four people play a shooter together on one TV, at a time when that was rare on consoles. You split the screen into four squares, picked characters and a level and went at it. Friends came over after school, maybe with a rented copy from Blockbuster on a Friday night, and played until someone's parents told them to go home.

Multiplayer was an afterthought, added late. Programmer Steve Ellis did most of the work on it, roughly six months before the game came out. It became the part people played for years, long after they'd finished the missions.

Looking at someone else's corner of the screen was called screen watching, and everyone did it, even while accusing everybody else. People had the same argument at LAN parties, except there the cheater was across a room of monitors. Here he was elbowing you on the couch, and you could hear him breathing.

The Oddjob rule

The biggest fight in GoldenEye history had nothing to do with skill. It was about Oddjob, the short henchman with the hat. Because he was shorter than the other characters, he was harder to hit, and a lot of groups banned him outright.

Years later, one of the developers, Mark Edmonds, admitted in an interview, "It's definitely cheating to play as Oddjob!" He said the team liked letting players make up their own rules, and they did. Oddjob bans, no-radar rules and fights over the Golden Gun were all settled on couches. The game never weighed in.

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Weapons and modes

Part of the fun was picking how you'd play. You could set a match to use only certain weapons, like pistols, rocket launchers or proximity mines. Proximity mines turned a level into a minefield where everybody crept around corners. Slappers Only made everyone fight with their bare hands, and nobody took it seriously for more than a few minutes.

Then there were the levels. Facility, with its bathroom stalls and long hallways, was a favorite. Temple, Complex and Caves had their fans too. Every group had a level they always picked and one they refused to play, and nobody remembered how the ban started. Kids made up the same kind of house rules while trading Pokémon with a link cable.

Who made GoldenEye?

GoldenEye was made by a small team at Rare, a British studio. Martin Hollis's first hires were programmer Mark Edmonds, Karl Hilton, who built the levels and backgrounds, and B. Jones, who worked on the characters. David Doak and Steve Ellis joined later, and Duncan Botwood came on during the first year. For most of the project, the team was only around ten people.

That small group made a game that played very differently from the shooters on PCs at the time. You could aim at specific parts of an enemy, guards reacted differently depending on where they were hit, and each level had a list of objectives that got longer on harder difficulties. Finishing a level on 00 Agent was a real accomplishment, and unlocking the cheats took even more work.

Big sales and big awards

GoldenEye sold more than 8 million copies, making it one of the best-selling games on the Nintendo 64. In its first month in the US, it was the second best-selling home console game, behind Star Fox 64. In 1998, it won a BAFTA award, the British award for games and movies, and Rare was named best UK developer.

Rare followed it in 2000 with Perfect Dark, which ran on an improved version of the same engine. Many fans say Perfect Dark was even better, though GoldenEye was the one everyone remembers. Critics loved it too, and it holds a score of 96 out of 100 on Metacritic.

Can you still play GoldenEye?

Yes, you can still play GoldenEye. On January 27, 2023, it came out on Nintendo Switch Online and on Xbox, after years of rights problems kept it off newer systems. The Xbox version added sharper graphics, while the Switch version added online multiplayer for the first time.

Getting it back felt like a reunion, and plenty of grown adults planned a night around playing it with the same friends from high school, the way another crowd once planned a Wii Sports bowling tournament. Plenty of people also kept their old consoles, and an N64 with GoldenEye still shows up at game nights and retro bars, usually with one controller that's been sticky since 1998.

What the sleepover looked like at 3 a.m.

Somebody always picked Oddjob anyway, and nobody was surprised.

Where the couch arguments went

Later on, the same arguments moved online with Halo 2 and Xbox Live. FriendCrib has a Games forum where you can settle the Oddjob debate for good.

Make a crib, tell us who you always picked, and wait for someone to say that's cheating.