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Comment by earbitscom | Hacker News Reader

This was the greatest video game ever made.

Watching your arms float around disjointedly as you run is the best part, or taking 25 sniper shots to kill a guard. I went from playing MW3 one morning to Goldeneye in the afternoon and it was mindblowing.

I spent plenty of time playing GoldenEye; it was a good game. But the hyperbole surrounding it on the internet is unbelievable.

It was released in August 1997. Even if you only care about the first-person shooter genre, Duke Nukem 3D had already been out for over a year, and it was a much more sophisticated game.

Sophistication wasn't what made GoldenEye great. I think the four person multi-player and control accessibility are what made GoldenEye such a big hit. There was something very fluid and "easy" about the controls in GoldenEye. Many of my friends that never played FPS made the jump for that game, and we spent countless hours swearing like sailors as we killed each other in the archives.

I liked it for the fun single player level design mostly. The game engine also paid a lot of attention to details othe fps did not. Different reactions based on where the bullet hits an enemy. Security cameras. Alarms. Stealth sections.

I really enjoyed the music and atmosphere. It really made you feel like you were in a James Bond movie. I also enjoyed all the shout-outs to the old movies too - stuff like the Moonraker level.

I agree, it was the multi-player which made it the great game it was. I remember my buddies and I made up a game in the Complex map where one person would take what we dubbed "the house" which was an area you could go up and had a vantage point of several areas while the other person had to try and take the "house". It was a good time.

Definitely agree that it was the multiplayer that made it a hit.

I had a friend who memorized the respawn pattern for some of the levels in goldeneye. He also memorized paths quick enough from spot to spot to be at the right spot every time you respawned.

He'd only have to kill you once. After that, you'd respawn and meet a bullet in the back of your head, respawn, bullet in the head, respawn, bullet in the head, until endgame.

I didn't memorize the respawn pattern but I knew where all of the respawn spots were, so I'd throw a proximity mine on each one. My friends would be so pissed, they'd respawn and die over and over and over.... ;)

My friends and I hung a golf club with cardboard hanging from it across the TV so that you couldn't see past your half of the screen in team mode. Suddenly, recognizing the sounds of particular doors became a valued skill.

It was all about trolling your friends with remote trigger mines and proximity mines.

Getting access to the tank on the single player level in the arctic air base was precious too.

...and the rage that accompanies being hoist by one's own petard.

Simply great game and the remake of it on the Wii is not half as good as the original. I remember that I nearly knew every map by heart :)

(But I didn't manage to remember the respawn points.. crazy ;))

I had already been playing Quake for a year by then and Goldeneye was an extremely slow game in comparison. I've never really been impressed with any console FPS since then (actually I really like the first Gears of War).

Some of our employees play this game a few days a week after work. Remote mines in the Complex, 2v2 or free for all.

If you think you're good, we're hiring for a few positions. See profile.

Was? Until what?

elite?

Perfect Dark, which was basically the same game but with updated graphics and an alien plotline.

That game always seemed like a choppy, blurry GoldenEye to me.

Perfect Dark benefited greatly from the N64 expansion pack, and was a lot less fun without it. I'm not certain it was better than Golden Eye (mostly because I found the second level very frustrating) but it had better graphics and a much more ambitious style of play.

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