GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Demo Footage Shows What Could Have Been

I don't think for a moment that Goldeneye would have been the cultural phenomenon that it ended up being if the development team had stuck with the "on-rails" format.

This would have changed everything. I remember when Nintendo was toying with the idea of Ocarina of Time being first-person; I believe using a modified Goldeneye engine.

If anyone wants to see the full video of the Nintendo E3 1996 video here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEbKnlCDDo4

I recently replayed this last month
Hot damn it aged so, so, so horribly

@PBandSmelly yeah, unfortunately it hasn't aged well at all and felt very clunky upon revisiting. Nostalgia is a double edged sword! Still, it was a blast back in the day!

That would have been horrible.

I play it all the time.
It has aged perfectly well and is still probably the best 4 player deathmatch couch game.

Is it just me, or does it feel like more and more stuff regarding beta N64 games keeps showing up recently?

Loved this game! Meh to those "Aged Horrible" comments.

Haven't played it in a while. But I played Perfect Dark some, and that has aged well, and it has basically the same gameplay.

still playable and great fun! yes graphics are worse than now from 20 years ago, well done to those who have pointed that out, you must have scored high in your school exams!

I want Goldeneye 007 on the Switch. I don't mind if it would be a remaster or not. Ocarina of time and this one was the best for me on N64 back in the time.

Please no one else diss such an important masterpiece of gaming!!

And by the way if you hook up your N64 to an old CRT TV and have a decent controller then it still looks good and is 100% playable. No discussion needed.

Thank God it wasn't on rails.

Goldeneye 007 is one of the most important games.

I still play GE and PD with a college friend of mine. Modern shooters are cool, but not the same.

@beazlen1 I agree I hooked a ps1 up to a floor model and was like wow still looks good just not on the newer tvs

GoldenEye is still amazing, I’ve been replaying it loads on my N64 with the UltraHDMI mod over the past couple of years.

I think what makes GoldenEye so great (and is also very appropriate given this article is about the game’s origins as an on-rails shooter) is that the game always surprises me. No two plays of a level are the same, the AI is always in different places or doing different things, which forces you to get good at the controls rather than just devising strategies for the same enemies every time. In fact, just a week ago I was playing Silo and there were extra guards in every room where you plant the explosives for some reason. The game is always different and I think being trapped on a fixed path would have prevented that. So thank goodness for Dr Doak changing the game!

One more reason why on-rails would have sucked- as far as I’m aware the N64 never had a light gun, so a game like Virtua Cop/Time Crisis without a gun would have been a lot less fun.

@PBandSmelly disagree mate, it still very enjoyable and I fire it up at least once a month

Great game. I completed it when I was like 11, I remember those laser guns being such a pain when the enemies had them.

@SuperGhirahim64 Your welcome.

The 64 bit era was so odd because graphics became distinctly more rendered looking compared to to pixels and hand drawn art. It was both a watershed moment and one that defines the aged look of these games. I think this is why 16 bit games seem to age better because it is less of a change in graphical quality and more evolutionary.
Goldeneye, being a landmark game of the era, still offers solid replay value and a connection the movie franchise no other games seem to match. It just feels like the movie in some areas of gameplay.

The "ageing" issue GoldenEye has is about the controls:
https://youtu.be/a4qJ8wNfgXY?t=121

Which is a shame. Some elements of design that set GoldenEye apart from where the genre has gone are the non-combat objectives that the levels were designed around and the somewhat meandering layout of the levels, which lend themselves to objective based design. These two traits make the game more than a string of combat scenarios, it's a spy-movie simulator, and that makes it even more of an off-rails experience than most modern shooters.

I personally enjoy the graphics. The characters look like exaggerations of the film characters which is more fun to look at than the realistic versions in the remake with its muddy, gray graphics. I swear, all Activision games from the PS3 to PS4 generation look so dull. Such a shame when their games used to look so amazing on the Atari 2600.

I had a copy of the promo VHS that Nintendo Power gave out to subscribers back in the day and I remember seeing this clip.