GoldenEye 007

GoldenEye 007 is a first-person shooter developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 in 1997, based on the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye. Its single-player campaign broke from the run-and-gun norm of the era with objective-driven, lightly stealthy mission design, letting players approach guarded facilities, snowfields, and jungle bases at their own pace, with objectives scaling up on higher difficulties. It is remembered just as much, if not more, for its four-player split-screen multiplayer, a mode reportedly added late in development, which turned the console's controller ports into a social institution. Deathmatches on the Facility and Complex, house rules like Slappers Only, and the perpetual argument over whether picking the short-statured Oddjob was cheating became a defining shared memory for a generation of players. A critical and commercial smash that sold many millions of copies, it is widely credited with proving that the first-person shooter could work on consoles and paving the way for the genre's console future. It has no beaches and no summer scenery to speak of, yet as the game that packed friends onto one couch through countless school-free afternoons, it belongs to summer through memory rather than setting. That it still gets pulled out at gatherings decades later only proves the point.