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.
The rise of cheap internet is what ushered this away. Even the original GE devs saw it coming. Perfect Dark, the followup using the same team and engine, was originally slated to ship with a modem and RJ-11 jack in the cartridge.
I’ve never heard this story either, and given the love for Rare products of this era and Perfect Dark itself I can’t imagine a juicy fact like this being hard to find online, I couldn’t find any references either. Prototypes of this would be fetching a fortune as well should they exist.
You are looking at it from the wrong side though. I always have a lan party every new year's eve with my friends, and whenever I'm in my country of origin. However, I'm happy to have internet parties to compensate and keep friendship going when I'm back to the country where I live in. That couldn't be done with goldeneye, so I thank modern internet
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.
Yes, I could say the same about Mario Kart 64, Tribes, Unreal, Quake, or any number of other games, but:
1) This post is about GoldenEye, so that’s what we’re talking about.
2) It doesn’t matter who is first or if other things are similar; it’s undeniable that some games just happen to hit on a certain combination of elements that makes them a hit, and others just don’t, even if they have the same feature list.
3) At the time, most FPS games were single-player with some kind of storyline, with multiplayer being mainly an afterthought. GoldenEye has a pretty good storyline for single-player, so people would buy it for that, and then just happen to have it for the multiplayer. This no doubt contributed to its popularity, as most people just had it around and it turned out to be a great thing to do with friends too.
Local multiplayer had been a thing for ages, of course, but the N64 was something special because it was the first significant console that supported four full controllers (not just paddles) from day 1 without an aftermarket multitap. There was unprecedented four-player support, and simultaneous four-player play is a different experience than passing around two controllers.
It wasn't just Goldeneye, true, but Goldeneye was one of the console's best sellers, it was out within the first year, and it was arguably the first really top-shelf FPS for any console, so it left a big impression.
A few of my friends and I still get together every now and then, have pizza, sometimes drink, and play videogames together, only now it's from across the US using video and voice chat.
Whether it's super smash bros, overwatch, or any number of silly/stupid steam games that someone picked up for a few dollars one day, that "social" aspect is still right there waiting for you just the same as it was, but now you have MANY more options of games to play, and ways to play them.
Not OP, but I'll agree to disagree. VOIP and webcams are fantastic, but if it can be arranged, nothing beats a LAN party. The required logistics, planning and actually being in the same room with my friends just take things to a new level (for me anyway).
You can have a damn good time that way, but it doesn't quite measure up to having all your friends in the same room, IMO. I have a collection of single-screen 4-player games on Steam, and I like to pack along my laptop, A/V cables, and four gamepads when I visit friends. :)
Most successful so far are Broforce, Monaco, and Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime.
True. Alternatively the group could decide that "screen-watching" is part of the game because anyone can do it. You just had to be good enough (knowing the levels and what people usually do in them) to take full advantage of it.
I never had an N64 to practice so I'd just run around with a Laser or grenade launcher and try to spam2win (or at least take someone down with me).
Perfect Dark was great for that too, with the tranq darts, and the laptop gun. I remember having so much fun with friends as we figured out the most rage-inducing ways tomabuse the laptop gun emplacements. Duke Nukem 3D was fantastic as well, with the pipe bombs and laser tripwires.
God I miss weird, fun weapons in the days before every shooter played the same, and had to be balanced to sub-micron specifications.
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.
Goldeneye and Donkey Kong 64 split-screen were pretty much the go-to games for my friend group back in middle and high school (late '90s/early 2000s).
They stuck around even well after better consoles and games came along-- most of us ended up going down the Sony side of the PS2/Xbox/GC generation, which was limited to two players without a multitap. The N64's four controller ports were really a killer feature for the system-- it meant that the only thing you needed for four-way multiplayer was to have each player bring along their controllers from home.
My son still gets together with his friends. They will bring over their PS4 and connect to his computer monitor in his room and they will play with each other “online” sitting right by each other.
At one point, he’s had four friends over all with PS4s playing against each other on separate displays in the house - thank goodness for wired gigabit Ethernet through the house and a bidirectional gig-e Internet connection that didn’t even blink at the traffic. My wife and I were still able to watch DirecTVNow....
Back in the day, they would have to drag desktop computers, CRT monitors and known how to network them for LAN parties.
The latter was basically my thing in the neighborhood for a time. Started out with BNC connected coax and then upgraded the kit to TP and hubs/switches. Crazy thing is that i had perhaps the shittiest internet connection around...
'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.
Drunk driving movements throughout the 1970's and 1980's are responsible for this regulation. Groups like MADD: Mothers Against Drunk Driving fought hard to change the way things were. Organizations involving people with relatives that passed away as a result of a drunk driving accident, which was frighteningly common back then.
During high school, and prior to attending Driver's Ed classes, we had an assembly organized by various local chapters of anti-drunk driving groups, where a guy in his late 20's spoke about being amputated below the waist, because when he drove into a large tree, the engine block rebounded through the dashboard, and onto his pelvis, coming home from the bar one night. People talk about how prior to automotive safety standards developed in the 1990's (air bags, anti-lock brakes) cars were absolute death traps, and I believe it.
That movement achieved some of its goals with those laws, and receded during the 1990's when broader programs encompassing drugs and social diseases were more normalized.
I think it makes sense, because in the United States, people find some amount of identity in the cars they own, which seems to be less intense throughout Europe, where driving absolutely everywhere isn't as ingrained into daily life and culture.
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.
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).
It was 18 for a while during the 70’s. But kids were getting drunk and crashing and dying like crazy, so Ronald Reagan raised the drinking age back to 22 in the 1980’s with the threat of cutting highway funding to states that did not comply.
When I was on my first business trip at 18, I couldn't check into a hotel in Michigan by myself. I had to call me contact at (then) DaimlerChrysler to meet me for check in. I had a credit card that could buy a brand new car, but I couldn't get the key to a $75 hotel room due to age.
I later found out that, at the time, there was no law preventing me from acquiring the room, but the hotel policy was to not allow unaccompanied individuals under 21.
And insurance companies had enough sense to charge an arm and a leg to a single 24 year old with a Mustang. My insurance cost more than my car note back then.
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.
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.
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.
> The thing Goldeneye really brought was massive popularity.
Exactly. I always thought Goldeneye was inferior to contemporary PC shooters, but for many who didn't have a powerful PC at the time, Goldeneye was their first FPS and they probably feel the same way about it as I do about the original Doom.
Indeed, I wasn't impressed with the game but that's partly being unused to the controller and mainly being previously spoiled by multiplayer Doom when a friend brought his laptop over and 4 player on my college LAN.
> for many who didn't have a powerful PC at the time,
In the late '90s I think most people did not have a PC at all. They were only just becoming affordable as the millennium hit. Surely console systems were more prevalent.
Quake was nice tech, but Goldeneye blew it out of the water in terms of gameplay and content. I always thought Quake felt like a very long tech demo more so than a game.
I had the original 3dfx card just to play Quake, but there were a number of things that still impressed me about Goldeneye.
- It ran on a console and not a $1000 PC.
- The game managed to go beyond what had been done in Doom and Quake, and actually have cutscenes that tell a story. Some of the cutscenes were super cinematic — especially for their time.
You didn't need a 3D card to play Quake, its software renderer was amazing in its own right. In fact, I much preferred the aesthetics of the software renderer over the blur-fest of the bilinear filtering on the 3dfx cards.
Oh I’m aware. I wanted those insane frame rates. I lived in bumfuck Pennsylvania where high speed Internet wasn’t going to arrive for a decade, so I wanted something to make the game cooler. Haha
Unlike Quake, Goldeneye focus was objectives-based, where you had to do more than reach the end of the level, and based its difficulty system upon it instead of simply making enemies stronger.
I must admit that GoldenEye is a bit slow-paced compared to Quake, but I partly blame the N64 controller for that. They still managed to make a great-looking for its time with the hardware resources they had.
> Unlike Quake, Goldeneye focus was objectives-based
Which also wasn't groundbreaking. Plenty of games were objective based, going back to the 8 bit era. A game like Exile [1] on the BBC Micro was easily as complex as Goldeneye, if not more so.
The control aspect alone of Goldeneye was awful. As a game it always felt forced and 'clunky' to me, compared to the smoothness and elegance of Quake.
It was far from a perfect game that's for sure, but it combines the elements of FPS, mission objectives, great level design (you might want to read how they managed to get some textures to fit the limited memory of the N64), a compelling story (that wasn't an exact replica of the movie, too many games make that mistake), couch/splitscreen multiplayer along with cheats you could unlock by being good at speedrunning.
All together, those made a great game for its time.
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.
> Quake was a blast, but we weren't all in the same room, let alone the same couch.
I have fond memories of my Quake LAN parties and meeting to fight/exchange Pokémon on the Gameboy.
Playing GoldenEye on my friend's N64? I hated it. Found it pretty boring, and so did everyone else (except the N64 owner).
YMMV of course, circumstances are different, which I think is what OP was pointing at. E.g.: if you're on the USA PC gaming isn't (wasn't?) as ingrained in your culture as in Europe.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
