GoldenEye 007 is the most important social event of 1997, and I am including weddings.
That sentence is not true. It is roughly 40 percent true, and the 40 percent is the part that matters if you were 21 years old in the fall of 1997 and exactly one person you knew owned a Nintendo 64. It doesn’t matter that eight million cartridges were sold, making it the third best-selling game the console ever had, because eight million cartridges did not produce eight million players. They produced roughly two million living rooms, and every one of those living rooms had the same four people in it, and the same one of those four people had paid for everything.
I need to talk about that person for a second, because he is the actual subject of this essay and nobody ever writes about him.
Photo by Evan-Amos, via Wikimedia Commons, released into the public domain.
The guy who owned the Nintendo 64 is the most underrated person of the decade
Here is what he spent. The console was $199 in September 1996 and Nintendo cut it to $149.99 by March 1997, which sounds like a bargain until you learn that the cartridges were running $55 to $70 apiece, which Sony’s own people were saying out loud that August, because they were selling CDs for twenty bucks and could afford to be smug about it. Then he bought three more controllers. He bought three more controllers for a machine that, when he bought it, did not have a single game worth playing with four people. That is not a purchase. That is a prophecy. He was betting his own money that a reason would show up.
And then, on August 25, 1997, one did, and it was based on a Pierce Brosnan movie that had come out almost two years earlier, and it had been made by a team of about nine people in the English countryside for whom this was, in nearly every case, their first job in video games. Think about how that reads in 1997. A movie game. Movie games were what your aunt bought you because the box had a face she recognized. The film itself was old enough that the sequel, Tomorrow Never Dies, was coming out that Christmas, which meant the game was a licensed product for the wrong Bond movie. (Brosnan, for what it’s worth, has spent the years since making the Bond movies nobody would let him make anymore, which is a different essay.) Everything about it said “clearance bin by Thanksgiving.”
Photo by Philip Romano, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Instead it became the reason you went to his house. Not to his house to hang out. To his house to sit on a specific couch cushion, because the cushion determined your quadrant, and your quadrant determined how badly the guy on your left could see your screen.
The multiplayer was contraband
This is the part I cannot get over, and I have been not getting over it for a long time. The thing that made GoldenEye the thing it was, the four-player split-screen mode that put a quarter-inch of gray plastic between you and three people who wanted you dead, was not in the plan. It was not in the design document. It was not approved. The programmer, Steve Ellis, built it in the last months of production, and he did it, in his own words, without the knowledge or permission of management at Rare or Nintendo. The game was already late. The director, Martin Hollis, has said there were six-month stretches when nobody from management even visited the office, which is the only reason it got in. Grant Kirkhope, who wrote the music, has said flatly that no one wanted it and that the idea was called stupid when it was pitched. The whole mode, the one that ate every weekend from Labor Day 1997 until whenever you moved out, was built in about six weeks by a guy who didn’t ask.
Here is an analogy from the 1997 shelf. You know how every CD you bought that year had a hidden track? You’d let the last song end and sit there through four minutes of silence, and then something would start, usually a joke, occasionally the best thing on the record. GoldenEye is a hidden track that turned out to be the album. Except it’s worse than that, or better, because with a hidden track you still bought the CD for the single. Nobody bought GoldenEye for the single. The single-player campaign is a real thing. It has twenty missions and stealth and a Klobb. I have met roughly four people who finished it, and all four of them finished it alone, on a weeknight, and did not tell anyone, because that is not what the cartridge was for. The cartridge was for Saturday. Saturday was the hidden track.
(There is a second, smaller thing here that I love: the multiplayer maps were carved out of the single-player levels, and some of them couldn’t handle four players because they were never designed to. Which means the most famous four-player arenas of the 1990s were, structurally, a guy’s leftovers.)
There were four rules, and every one of them is a 1997 artifact
You did not need the manual. Nobody read the manual. The manual was the little booklet with the gray cover that lived in the cardboard box under the TV until the box got crushed. What you needed was the rules, and the rules were not in any booklet, because the rules were not about the game. They were about the room.
No Oddjob. This is the famous one. Oddjob was short, the auto-aim shot over his head, and picking him got you hit with a throw pillow before the match started. For 21 years this was a folk belief. Then, in 2018, the actual developers confirmed in an oral history that yes, they knew, they thought it was cheating during play-testing, and they left it in because it was, in the lead artist’s words, too much fun to take out. I want you to notice what this means. The game shipped with a known exploit and no way to patch it, because it was 1997 and a cartridge was a physical object and there was no such thing as a patch. So the fix was not code. The fix was a person. The fix was your friend leaning over and saying “don’t.” That is the entire social history of the decade in one character select screen.
No screen-looking. Think about how strange this is. The game put all four screens on one 27-inch television, visible to everyone, and then asked you not to look. It is the only shooter in history that ran on the honor system. There was no fog of war. There was fog of manners. And everyone looked, obviously, and everyone denied it, and the denial was a kind of ritual, like saying grace before a meal you were going to eat anyway. I would argue (I am arguing) that this is the last time a piece of consumer technology trusted you. Every game since has been designed on the assumption that if you can cheat, you will, and has built the walls accordingly. GoldenEye built no walls. It put you two feet from a person whose screen you could see and dared you to be decent about it.
Winner keeps the good controller. The gray one. The one whose joystick still had tension. Because the N64 stick wore out, and everyone knew whose had worn out first, and there was always one controller where you could push it all the way left and Bond would lean, gently, as if considering it. Losing on that controller was not your fault. Losing on the good one was.
Settings are a treaty. License to Kill, Slappers Only, Proximity Mines in the Facility, no radar, no Golden Gun unless the guy who always wanted the Golden Gun had brought the pizza. The options menu was not a menu. It was a negotiation between four people with different amounts of leverage, and the leverage was things like whose house it was, who had a car, and who had already lost three in a row and was threatening to go home. Every match was preceded by a treaty. Every treaty was broken by the second round.
Now look at those four rules together. Not one of them is about the game. Every one of them is about the fact that there were four bodies on a couch, that the bodies could see each other, and that the only enforcement mechanism was the bodies. Take the room away and the rules stop meaning anything. Oddjob is just a character. Screen-looking is impossible. The good controller is a peripheral. The treaty is a lobby setting. This is why I am going to say the thing I actually believe.
Every online shooter since is a worse version of that Saturday
You are about to tell me this is nostalgia. It isn’t. It’s arithmetic.
Here is the hypothetical, and I want you to actually run it. It is April 1997. Steve Ellis does not build the multiplayer. He goes home at six. The game ships in August exactly as designed: a single-player Bond campaign, twenty missions, no split-screen.
Step one: it does fine. The reviews were about the campaign anyway; Edge gave it a 9 out of 10 and later admitted it should have been a 10, and the campaign was most of why. It sells a few million. Good movie game. Surprising.
Step two: nobody comes over. This is the whole thing. A single-player game is played at home by the person who owns it. The guy with the N64 finishes it on a Tuesday. Your Saturdays revert to whatever they were in 1996, which if you were 21 was probably a basement, a case of something, and a VCR.
Step three: the Nintendo 64 loses its argument. The N64 had four controller ports on the front of the machine, and in 1997 that was a promise nobody had cashed. The PlayStation had a cheaper console, cheaper games, and a bigger library. The one thing the N64 could do that Sony’s box couldn’t was put four people on a couch, and without GoldenEye there is no proof that anyone wanted that. So the four ports become a joke, the way the 64DD became a joke. Nintendo’s console story for the next decade is different.
Step four, and this is where it gets uncomfortable: the console shooter does not become a social genre. It becomes a solitary one, like it was on the PC, where Doom and Quake lived on a desk in a bedroom with the door closed. When Halo shows up in 2001 there is no expectation, none, that you’d play it with three people in a room. And Xbox Live, when it comes, is not built to replicate a couch. It is built to replace a desk.
So here is what the hypothetical actually proves, and it is not what I thought it would prove when I started. It proves that the thing everyone is nostalgic about (the room) and the thing everyone has now (the lobby) are not two versions of the same idea. The lobby was built to replace the room. Every party chat, every ranked match, every headset, is an attempt to simulate four people on a couch by removing the couch. And it doesn’t work, not because the games are worse (they are better, embarrassingly, by every measure that a game can be measured by) but because the four rules don’t survive the trip. You cannot lean over and say “don’t.”
If you could play one more four-player match in 1997, but only with the three people you played with most, could you name all three? Take your time. That’s the score.
I don’t have a theory about Perfect Dark, but I think about it
Here is the thing that doesn’t fit, and I’m not going to make it fit.
Rare made a follow-up. Perfect Dark, 2000, same console, mostly the same people. One of them has said it was superior in almost every way, that they had learned everything from the first attempt, and that it sold less than half as many copies. Less than half. A better game, a better multiplayer, more maps, more options, bots, and it could not get the same four people back on the same couch.
I don’t know why. I could tell you it was because the Dreamcast was out and the PlayStation 2 was coming and the couch had moved. I could tell you the guy who owned the N64 had moved out. Both of those are probably true. But I think the real reason is stupider and sadder, which is that you only get one accident. GoldenEye was contraband. Nobody planned it, nobody expected it, and the four rules grew around it the way ivy grows on a building nobody is maintaining. Perfect Dark was a plan. You cannot plan a Saturday.
And then the game itself disappeared for a very long time. An Xbox Live Arcade remaster was built in 2008 and reportedly needed only two more months, and it was killed because Nintendo, MGM, and Microsoft could not agree on the license. Three companies. Fourteen years. The most played multiplayer game of its decade was unplayable, legally, on anything new, for the entire time its original players were becoming the people who run those three companies. When it finally came back in January 2023, it was the same game to the pixel, and I don’t think anyone who played it that first weekend got the thing they were looking for, because the thing they were looking for was not on the cartridge. It never was.
The N64 controller had three prongs. You held the middle one for GoldenEye, thumb on the stick, index finger on the trigger underneath, and the left prong just sat there, unused, like a third arm. Every controller made since has had two prongs.
Nobody has needed the middle one since. That is the whole review.
