Gamertell

In honor of the recently deceased (though some still have hope) Xbox Live Arcade port of the classic Nintendo 64 shooter, Cut/Scenes is taking a look at one of the greatest movie-to-game adaptations ever made: Goldeneye 007.

In 1995, MGM announced that Pierce Brosnan would be the next actor to fill the shoes of James Bond, the debonair super spy made famous in films that often rode the line between serious action and goofy antics (see: whacked out gadgets, nigh-insane character names). The film put newly minted Bond to work chasing the goldeneye satellite – a weapon with the capability to knock out entire cities, and set him against a new slew of challenges and shady bad guys. It was remarkably successful. Critics praised the reinvented post-cold war, post-feminist Bond (and the thrilling action sequences) and it pulled in fantastic numbers at the box office. When the requisite videogame version was announced, barely anyone took notice.

Goldeneye 007 came out on the Nintendo 64 in August 1997, almost two full years after the film’s release, and unexpectedly took the game world by storm. At the time, the console first-person shooter (FPS) was still in its evolutionary infancy. In fact, gamers commonly referred to titles in the genre as “Doom clones” in a nod to the 1993 game that popularized the formula. The new title evolved the mechanics of the console FPS with its intricate mission structure and emphasis on stealth, and took off almost entirely by word of mouth (the universally stellar reviews didn’t hurt, either). It went on to win “Game of the year” awards and broke sales records as the top selling game of 1998 (across all platforms).

Goldeneye 007 got just about everything right. It nailed the look and feel of the film, capturing the crumbling exteriors of ex-Soviet landscapes right along with the tech-savvy labs controlling the goldeneye satellite. It told the story unobtrusively, through in-game dialog and brief cut-scenes, making subtle (if limited) use of a mechanic that Half-Life popularized more than a year later, never interrupting the action for long. The music and sound effects were similarly impressive (especially on the cartridge-based N64 hardware) with fantastic sound design that captured the distinct feel of every gun and vehicle in the game world.

Most importantly, the game evolved the genre by leaps and bounds. Instead of following the usual “find the key and open the door while you shoot things” mission structure of the other “Doom clones”, Goldeneye’s mission objectives were varied and intense. Players needed to use stealth and tactical know-how in order to complete missions on 00-agent difficulty, and the game mixed up objectives on all difficulty settings. Instead of just killing goons, players were snapping pictures of enemy view screens, copying keys, finding rocket telemetry data, rescuing hostages, and protecting hacker extraordinaire Natalya.

As for bringing the movie experience to the game, Goldeneye 007 proved a faithful recreation. The plot of the film unfolds through the action as much as possible, making use of in-game dialog for important scenes such as Alec’s faked “murder” in the chemical weapons facility. The scene was presented in real-time in the game, as the player has complete freedom to roam around and complete his/her objective of placing mines on the tanks while general Ouromov storms the room and takes Alec hostage.

The levels were built logically around the film’s events in this way, with several stages that fleshed out the back-story and showed the player exactly what Bond was doing before (and after) the proverbial camera started to roll. The Train level had Bond fighting through hordes of henchmen before he can take on the tricky hostage situation upfront, while other stages visited areas years prior to the film’s events (Bunker 1, severnaya, surface) in order to build back-story and context for the present day events.

No one can write about the success of the game without mentioning the stellar multiplayer mode that secured its place in history. Making smart use of the N64’s then-revolutionary four controller ports, the mode invited players to duke it out across 11 unique (and beautifully balanced) arenas with a variety of unique game types. Plus, it was inescapably cool to play as popular characters from the James Bond canon, including the unfairly advantaged Oddjob and unfriendly giant Jaws. The game still routinely makes “best of” multiplayer lists, hanging tough in a sea of modern online shooters (Halo 3, Team Fortress 2, etc.) and party games.

It’s a crying shame that the enhanced Xbla version won’t see the light of day (at least, not without an extremely aggressive push for it) so that younger gamers can appreciate the simple, elegant gameplay of Goldeneye 007. It was evolved, it was fun, it was true to the style of the film, and it’s still worth dusting off the old cartridge today.

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