GoldenEye 007

GoldenEye 007 is a first-person shooter developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64, released in August 1997. Based on the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, it was directed by Martin Hollis and built by a largely first-time team, several of whom had never made a game before. The single-player campaign casts the player as Bond across a series of objective-driven missions adapted from the film, with goals that change by difficulty level and an emphasis on gadgets, stealth, and accuracy rather than pure run-and-gun shooting. It was one of the earliest console shooters to feel genuinely viable with a controller, using the Nintendo 64 pad's analog stick for aiming and auto-aim assistance to bridge the gap left by the absence of a mouse. GoldenEye's lasting reputation, however, rests on its four-player split-screen multiplayer, a mode added late in development that was not part of the original design. Deathmatches across levels drawn from the campaign, a roster of Bond characters including the infamously small Oddjob, and house rules such as 'slappers only' made it a defining social game of its generation and a fixture of late-1990s living rooms. A major critical and commercial success, it sold over eight million copies and is regularly ranked among the most influential first-person shooters ever made, credited with proving the genre could thrive on consoles.