By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Right now, the James Bond franchise has been put on temporary hold while Amazon tries to find the perfect new actor to cast as 007. Most fans have been waiting for this announcement with bated breath, eager to learn who will headline the next decade or more of killer spy movies. Instead of looking forward, though, I find myself increasingly looking to the past. Not just at old Bond movies (though From Russia With Love is the gold standard of the franchise, and I’ll die on this hill), but at the game that made me into a super-fan of the franchise: GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64.
I was an ‘80s kid who hadn’t really gotten into James Bond in my early childhood, beyond seeing occasional glimpses of the character on cable TV. But as a teenager, I was the perfect age to enjoy GoldenEye, the 1995 movie that was basically a soft reboot of the franchise. As a gamer, I couldn’t get enough of the GoldenEye game on N64. The campaign was absolutely perfect, and the four-player splitscreen multiplayer was to die for. To this day, many players fondly remember this title for being the pinnacle of ‘90s console gaming, but most don’t realize how far this game’s influence extended. Simply put, we wouldn’t have the Halo or Call of Duty franchises without GoldenEye 007!
Bond. Games Bond
How did GoldenEye influence Halo, exactly? As you may or may not know, Halo wasn’t originally designed as a first-person shooter. Bungie, the studio behind the Halo franchise, considered many different iterations of the game, including a vehicular combat game and, later, a real-time strategy game. It was later imagined as a third-person shooter and finally became an FPS when the title was chosen as a launch game for the Xbox. Bungie struggled to make the multiplayer work, and they even ended up recoding the whole thing from scratch only four months before the game came out. The new design was great, and the game’s popular multiplayer turned Halo: Combat Evolved into one of the most popular games ever made.
Why was console multiplayer so important, though? While Bungie has never officially confirmed the earlier game’s influence, it seems obvious they wanted to try to one-up GoldenEye. As Stacey Henley wrote for The Gamer, the N64 Bond title “introduced the idea of single and multiplayer modes existing in the same game, on a home console, in a title that people actually enjoyed playing.” She noted how “multiplayer deathmatch” (a staple of Halo) “exists because of GoldenEye,” a game which also normalized things like headshots and scoped sniper rifles. Fortunately, Bungie’s effort paid off, and gaming magazines like Edge declared that Halo had dethroned GoldenEye as “the standard for multiplayer console combat.”
Bond Finishes The Fight
Halo: Combat Evolved felt like the inheritor of many GoldenEye staples, including free-roaming, 3D environments, cinematic cutscenes, story-driven set pieces, and so on. In turn, Halo ended up influencing another major FPS franchise: Call of Duty. The COD games followed the same dual-stick controller layout made popular by Halo, effectively normalizing this for all console FPS games. COD also borrowed Halo’s popular two-weapon limit, forcing players to be strategic about what they carried into battle. Most Call of Duty games also feature regenerating health, a major Halo staple. Later, Infinity Ward art director Joel Emslie even admitted that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was designed as a sci-fi flavored “Halo Killer.”
Without the success of GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, Halo would not have become the new gold standard of competitive console multiplayer. Without Halo’s influence, Call of Duty wouldn’t have become arguably the most popular FPS franchise in the entire world. Both of these newer franchises are great in their own way (I’m more of a Halo guy, myself), but they owe their very existence to a humble 1997 Nintendo game that left the entire world both shaken and stirred.
