GoldenEye 007 marks a major change in first-person shooter design

At the end of the summer of 1997, just about a quarter of a century ago, Golden Eye 007 stick firmly to the cartridge slot and the spiritual landscape of a generation. Pierce Brosnan’s perfectly sculpted hairstyle and 007 logo peek out from the curved arch of the Nintendo 64’s dark plastic panels, tracking countless hours spent in lo-poly gunfights, plastic trident controllers clutched in sweaty hands in endless split-screen rounds of death.

In the years since, shooters — and video games in general — have changed dramatically, and Yellow eyesIts reputation remains. Play it now, whether in Xbox version compromised multiplayer or Switch version compromised control, is a retrospective exercise for the majority of the re-release audience. But, freed from the nostalgia of personal memories and seen as part of a larger history, Yellow eyes become something else: an artifact of a genre, medium, and culture in transition.

Step out into the concrete of “The Dam,” Yellow eyesAt the game’s opening levels, modern players will likely be first impressed by the game’s original 3D look. The Soviet soldiers, their faces contorted in grain, turned somersaults in an attempt to dodge Bond’s bullets; the cliff surrounding one side of the dam consists of unnaturally smooth rectangles protruding outward at sharp angles; Bond’s bungee jumping game from Yellow eyes the film’s intro shows a Moai-faced James swooping down with the locked limb clumsiness of a fallen mannequin.

Photo: Code Mystics/Rare

It all looks pretty silly and outdated. However, in addition to the graphical highlights of the juvenile stage of 3D video games, is a clear attempt to provide a minimalist recreation of the game. Yellow eyes, movie. The atmosphere is dense with ’90s synth opera singers and trumpets echoing the iconic Bond movie theme song. Sean Bean, Izabella Scorupco, Robbie Coltrane and Alan Cumming appear as fun, shaky mirror versions of their movie counterparts. The characters deliver blunt lines that center the gunfights by retelling the film’s plot in a discrete manner. Mission objectives also complicate the action, reminding the player that a spy may need to shoot a padlock from a gate, quietly send guards on patrol, or swipe documents rather than simply dashing through. waves of enemies to achieve their goal. Choosing a higher difficulty mode requires the player not only to fight hard, but also to complete additional objectives, such as exploding ammunition or stealing data, to reinforce the idea that levels These are actual missions of the kind that Bond completes in the movies.

Remarkably, it does all of this while still delivering the immediate appeal of previously popular first-action shooters. Its arsenal of guns, grenades, mines, and karate choppers offers the same wide selection of weapons that ’90s shooters espouse. Yellow eyes move slower than many previous PC shooters (Death, earthquake, Blood, Duke Nukem 3Dor Heretic) but, played on a Nintendo 64 controller, it carries many of the same tactical capabilities. Developer Rare understands how to transfer the urgency, if not the actual speed, of the computer shooter to the home console. It won’t be overtaken until the first time Halo came to Xbox, four years later.

Later first-person shooters will continue to embrace Yellow eyescinematic aspirations. The genre was quickly dominated by the moodiness and central focus of the story of half-life, Deus Ex, thiefAnd Systemic shock 2. (One year later Yellow eyeson PlayStation, solid metal gears presented a more literal blend of cinema and espionage, albeit from a third-person perspective.) In the early 2000s, the original call of duty replace Medal of Honorhis efforts to make World War II films interactive, spending much effort in recreating cinematic versions of battlefields during the war.

Photo: Code Mystics/Rare

Yellow eyes not intended for cinematic reproduction like later games, but it also doesn’t quite fall into the same subgenre as many arcade-y shooters that preceded it. Instead, it occupies a middle ground between these two dominant schools of shooter design.

The feeling of being in space amidst significant changes is not just a coincidence or determining factor, but a reflection of the Bond film and the broader cultural context that inspired it. for its creation. In the 1995 film, the character was reintroduced after a six-year hiatus. License to kill. Yellow eyesThe first entry in the series, which takes place after the breakup of the Soviet Union, sees Bond navigate a new political landscape where the past manifests itself in the gangster terror of a former MI6 agent, believed to have been died and quietly profited from the economic chaos of post-production. -Soviet Union as an avenger from Britain’s past.

Like the game, Yellow eyes see Bond in transition. Brosnan’s first portrayal of the character downplayed the rampant goofiness of many earlier films, but not nearly as seriously as the sadistic, introverted agent portrayed in the Daniel Craig era. Brosnan’s Bond isn’t quite a ferocious soldier. Nor is he a spearhead killer or a spy parodying a smirk. Yellow eyes starring one character, both trying to thwart an apocalyptic plot that arose out of significant contemporary political issues And an agent of the British empire – one who sees good reason to be optimistic about his future again.

Photo: Code Mystics/Rare

From the point of view of capitalist leaders, the mid-1990s can feel, at least temporarily, like an era of victory: a victory for an ideology that steers in glaring defeat. of another ideology. The present era is positioned as something different – a period between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new geopolitical instability. The year 2001 saw the beginning of an eternal war on terror whose effects have defined the 21st century to this day.

Bond reflects on these changes with another seismic rethink: 2006 Royal Casino, a film where violence is not expressed through victims of bullets and weightless fist fights, but through bloody knuckles and painful deaths. A decade after the N64 Yellow eyes released and a year later Royal Casino, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare came to usher in the video game equivalent of this reinvention. With its success, the modern military shooter has fostered the less dreamy, duller aesthetic that has dominated the genre for a decade and is still popular today.

Photo: Code Mystics/Rare

Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the selection and naming of guns that wobble at the bottom of the first-person shooter’s screen. Separate abstract class Yellow eyes‘s Klobb, DD44 Dostovei, or D5K Deutsche from the real world guns they copied were pushed aside for fetish gun prototyping (and real-world licensing) will become expected from every new year call of duty entrance. The insect moans of ricochets keep Yellow eyes from conveys a tangible sense of violence have been replaced by super-accurate hi-fi headers. The culture of producing video games and action movies changes in both big and small ways.

In 2023, however, shooters — and video games in general — appear to be passing through a transitional period filled with future possibilities and looks as dated as the eras of the past. Yellow eyes release. Classic style games are popular again. Arcade action sits alongside shooters that focus on mood or storytelling. Mainstream design trends, at least in shooters, are as much about cinema as they are about simple lizard brains. run fast And Faster shooting.

In this kind of context, Golden Eye 007The reflection of a time between major changes feels more important than ever.