GoldenEye 007 (1997) (1997)
GoldenEye 007 (1997) is a 1997 shooter video game made by Rare.
GoldenEye 007 put a Bond film inside a first-person shooter and made it work in ways no licensed game had before. Playing as James Bond across missions drawn from the 1995 film, players move through a KGB facility, a dam, a satellite dish, and more, completing objectives rather than simply clearing enemies. Difficulty levels change those objectives rather than just enemy health, rewarding multiple playthroughs. The four-player split-screen mode became a cultural fixture in living rooms worldwide and remains one of the most-played local multiplayer experiences in console history.
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GoldenEye 007 (1997) in our writing
- Companion guide: Rare: GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie and the N64 Golden Age
A few thoughts on GoldenEye 007 (1997)
GoldenEye 007 rewrote what a licensed game could be and, alongside Doom and Quake, what a console shooter could be. The campaign's objective-based structure rewarded replaying missions at higher difficulties for new tasks rather than just harder enemies, a design choice that aged better than most of its era. The four-player split-screen mode became the specific kind of social experience that still prompts unprompted nostalgia decades later. Rare's adaptation respected both Bond's tradecraft and the player's intelligence, and almost nothing that came after fully matched what they built on the Nintendo 64 in 1997.
Four-player split-screen shooters for the couch
GoldenEye 007 made four controllers and one television a social format, complete with the house rule against picking Oddjob. These games run on the same premise: Bond-adjacent shooters built for a room, where half the fun comes from the person next to you calling out your screen-watching. Rare Replay bundles Perfect Dark, the follow-up that widened the formula.
Play the mission, then watch the Bond film behind it
GoldenEye 007 rebuilt the 1995 film as a set of objectives, so the dam jump and the Severnaya bunker become places you work through instead of places you watch. Run the pairing in both directions: the films these missions came from, plus the other Bond games that adapt one specific movie, including From Russia with Love and Quantum of Solace.
James Bond on the page and in comics
GoldenEye 007 sent a generation to Bond without a cinema ticket, and the print shelf works the same way. Fleming wrote The Man with the Golden Gun, the Young Bond run starts at SilverFin, and the comics stretch from the licensed James Bond strips to Kingsman, which takes the gadget-issuing secret service somewhere ruder.
Cold war infiltration thrillers with gadgets and tradecraft
The missions in GoldenEye 007 run on infiltration: a dam, a chemical plant, a Soviet radar dish in the snow, each approached with a silenced pistol and a stack of objectives. These stories share that appetite for tradecraft and hardware, from MacGyver improvising his way past a lock to the patient stalking in The Day of the Jackal.