For England, James...

I’ve been told that I have to write about GoldenEye 007 and its re-release, and I shall. Although you probably have seen many opinions already about the general “unhappiness” at the release, or made your own assumptions. So I’m not going into any real detail on that front, nor am I going to take a newsletter to bash something 25 years old. But, to comment on a few of the thoughts I've seen:

The re-release being locked behind two subscription paywalls on the respective consoles doesn’t bother me. It was always advertised as such. The lack of inclusion for the phsyical owners of Rare Replay on Xbox is a bit of a shame.

The lack of a modern control scheme on the Switch version is disappointing but not the end of the world, especially when Nintendo Switch Online's other N64 games make no similar concession.

The performance on either console isn’t what modern standards nor remasters would normally aim for but they are in their own ways individually faithful to the original. if we're honest.

And that’s the key here - the memories of the original game are probably way out of whack over the expectation.

A few things then about the Nintendo 64 console. It wasn’t exactly a best seller. Sure, it did ok globally with America selling over 20 million units but Europe as a whole (according to Wikipedia figures based off Nintendo’s own data) was just 6.35 million. America in fact made for well over two thirds of the N64’s total sales - this in an era now dominated by Sony’s PlayStation 1 and between two SEGA consoles with equally low results to Sony’s behemoth.

In the UK, I would hazard a guess that we likely made up a good half of those European sales, especially as development of games for the N64 was not only very rooted in Britain but also the games themselves were uniquely British. With the studio then known as Rareware developing several 3D games that would really define them and the N64 era, along with everyone’s memories of them today.

One of the things I absolutely hate in modern gaming discourse is the retrospective omniscience that is used when people talk about the past. If you’ve not read it knowingly, you’ve definitely heard it on YouTube. It’s part Mandela Effect, part half-remembered research and mostly all bullshit. For example, I as a 11 year old when the PS1 came out cannot tell you with any confidence that when the news of its release hit the airwaves or the magazines that I was excited to try it out. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t. I was 11. I didn’t give a hoot about researching the newest game or thinking about the impact of how 3D graphics and CD based consoles would change the world. No one at that age did. I was too busy thinking about Stan Collymore being at Liverpool and Damon Hill not winning the F1 title again.

When GoldenEye 007 came out in 1997, I couldn't tell you I was excited to play this amazing game from all that I’d heard at school from my friends. Because that didn’t happen. Did I play it before I owned a Nintendo 64? Possibly. I might have played it in a local video game store in one of those lock box terminals. And being a PC player at the time who already had experience of Quake and the like, the only memory I can ascribe to it was the split screen being rather small and the controller being really fucking weird to play on but when and where that was is mixed up in the far reaches of my own memory and is likely false.

In fact the only thing I can tell you with any certainty is the GoldenEye 007 was the first and only game I played on a Nintendo 64 until about 2000 when I picked one up second hand specifically for the purpose of buying and playing WWF Wrestlemania 2000 and the yet to be released WWF No Mercy.

Around 8 million units were sold of GoldenEye 007. A figure that would have meant nothing to me nor would I have cared about when I was 15/16 and picking it up second hand for the first time. I was busy thinking about post-puberty attractions, convincing myself that being a bassist was cool, gigging, how cool The Rock and Mick Foley were (read Have a Nice Day if you haven't), and Michael Owen being at Liverpool.

It’s the third best selling game for the N64 console according to the ESA and in a world before Halo and Timesplitters, became the benchmark for local multiplayer and first person shooter deathmatch games - with all due respect to Quake 2 and Unreal. But at the time, I didn’t care about any of that.

I played it and completed it because a) the PS1 offering of Bond games at the time was a bit poor (the Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough movie tie ins were EA’s first foray into the franchise), and because graphically it had something I considered personally better than those two games. Sure it’s not a great looker (old game is old) but - again with the retrospective omniscience warning - the animations were more fun and the actual control of the game was far more enjoyable. I was still a PC player so graphically, nothing was superior and like almost EVERYONE at the time, you would likely have played an N64 with an RF aerial output.

Even still the N64 isn’t great to look at (even emulated or modded compared to similarly aged consoles) because its output was so behind the times. There was no RGB, no SCART, or anything that most people would have to play with except the RF aerial output we’d used for the years and consoles previous to it.

And so the memories of the game have really been wrapped up in the nostalgia of a console that was factually only semi-successful and etched in so much legend of its importance to the genre of first person shooters (and licensed games) that actual recall of its importance and nostalgia is nigh on impossible without the 25 years worth of confirmation bias around it.

But… coming back to it now (having played the original as well), it’s good. It’s fun, has an absolutely cracking soundtrack, and it's an incredible pick-up-and-play FPS from an era that struggled to really immerse the player in that viewpoint due to technological limitations. It’s a lot clearer and cleaner than its original release thanks to modern power and dipping into the almost nugget sized levels and getting the challenge of unlocking all the extra modes and bonuses is another fun distraction from reality that games provide.

After all, the doomsday clock has just got closer to midnight so why not get stuck into a good evening session? 

Do it for England, James.