30 Years Ago, A James Bond Movie Secretly Laid The Blueprint For A Gaming Revolution

In 1995, a massive James Bond comeback movie — GoldenEye — created the seeds of a massive sea change in multiplayer games. Few could have known it at the time, but this 007 movie not only restarted the film franchise after six years of dormancy, it also served as the inspiration for one of the greatest N64 games of all time, 1997’s GoldenEye 007.

When GoldenEye debuted in theaters in the U.S. on November 17, it was a moment of celebration for long-suffering Bond fans. After years of speculation, Pierce Brosnan finally took up the mantle of 007, as the movie returned the Bond franchise to a cocktail of big stakes, humor, and tons of action. And, interestingly, if you rewatch the movie, 30 years later, through the lens of a game designer, you can see how the structure of GoldenEye set up the game and was the perfect source material.

Game developer Rare had been in talks to do a GoldenEye game since 1994, a year before the movie actually came out. And although the game didn’t hit until 1997 for the N64, the popularity of that 1995 007 movie was still strong. (Ironically, the next Brosnan Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies, hit theaters a few months after the N64 GoldenEye game.)

Famously, GoldenEye 007 revolutionized first-person shooters in two ways. First, it brought realism and complexity to a single-player experience, which allowed the player to truly relive several aspects of the film. That said, even if players were casual Bond fans or hadn’t seen the movie, the storyline and single-player mission were satisfying and compelling in the extreme. There were a variety of weapons, several increasingly difficult objectives, and a slick, now-famous pause function in which the player checked Bond’s special wristwatch and was treated to the dulcet tones of a slick, slow remix of the James Bond theme. (This music was based on the Éric Serra score for the film, but remade for the game by Graeme Norgate and Grant Kirkhope.)

But the second way GoldenEye impacted gaming history is much more obvious, and almost has nothing to do with the James Bond-specific context. GoldenEye was the first truly addictive and utterly fun four-player experience. Though the solo player shooter aspect of the game was huge, it’s the multiplayer mode that turned the game into a legend.

Although you didn’t need to be a Bond fan or have seen GoldenEye to love the game, the movie still created the go-to template. Because many of Bond’s missions take place in Russia in the game (both before and after the Cold War), many of the interiors have a spare, austere quality. The greens and browns of the Facility or the Library make for memorable, but not overly colorful, settings, which all come directly from the film. Rare’s achievement with GoldenEye wasn’t so much that it expanded on the settings of the film; it actually took inspiration from the film, and used those constraints — sometimes cramped hallways and old libraries — to create the consummate labyrinth for multiplayer battles.

The cast of characters in the GoldenEye film, too, offered a nice selection of playable personas. While it’s true that GoldenEye 007 had codes that unlocked characters from the classic films (like Jaws and Oddjob), the playable folks from the movie ranged from cool (Bond, Trevelyan) to colorful (Boris and Natalya) to deadly (Xenia and Mishkin) to utterly goofy-looking (General Ourumov). Only verbose CIA agent Jack Wade was left out of the game, due to a rights issue with actor Don Joe Baker’s likeness.

GoldenEye, the game, was very much its own thing, separate and apart from GoldenEye the movie. And yet, without the movie, GoldenEye 007 would have never found its inspiration, and an entire generation of gamers would never have been so profoundly impacted.

GoldenEye 007 is available for Nintendo Switch.