GoldenEye 007

GoldenEye 007 is the Nintendo 64 first-person shooter developed by Rare and published by Nintendo, released in North America on August 25, 1997. Based on the 1995 James Bond film, it casts the player as MI6 agent James Bond in a mission to stop Janus from using the GoldenEye satellite weapon. The game follows the film’s broad story while expanding it into playable operations, carrying Bond from a Soviet dam and chemical-weapons facility through Severnaya, St. Petersburg, Cuba, and other locations.

Its single-player campaign contains 20 missions, including two unlockable bonus stages. Before each operation, M delivers a briefing and a list of objectives. Reaching the exit is only part of the job: assignments can require retrieving keycards, photographing evidence, rescuing hostages, disabling alarms, destroying equipment, protecting scientists, or using Bond gadgets at the right place. This structure means a level can turn from a firefight into a careful search, and failure to complete a required task prevents a successful debriefing even if Bond survives.

The N64 version uses a first-person viewpoint and supports several controller configurations. Its default setup maps movement to the Control Stick, firing to Z, weapon selection to the C Buttons, and precise manual aiming to the R button. Players can use the aiming mode to line up shots, look through a sniper scope, or inspect distant guards. The single-player design makes room for both direct combat and quieter approaches: suppressed weapons, sightlines, and a well-placed shot can limit attention, while gunfire and alarms can bring additional guards into the action.

Bond finds pistols, submachine guns, rifles, sniper rifles, explosives, throwing knives, and film-inspired equipment during missions or takes weapons from defeated opponents. Magazine capacity, recoil, rate of fire, ammunition type, and accuracy give the arsenal distinct uses. Shots also register differently by location, so careful aim is valuable rather than merely cosmetic. Body armour adds protection, but there are no conventional health pickups; conserving armour, ammunition, and position is part of getting through a level. The game’s environments also react to combat with details such as breakable glass, bullet marks, and exploding objects.

Agent, Secret Agent, and 00 Agent difficulty levels alter more than enemy resilience and available ammunition. Higher settings add objectives to missions, so they reveal new tasks and routes instead of simply making the same campaign harsher. Completing missions at target times unlocks cheat options, while clearing the campaign on the higher difficulties opens the Egyptian and Aztec bonus stages. A later 007 Mode lets players tune variables such as enemy health, reaction speed, accuracy, and damage for a chosen mission.

GoldenEye 007’s multiplayer is built around local split-screen play for up to four people on one Nintendo 64. Players choose characters, arenas, weapons, match limits, and team settings, then compete in scenarios including standard deathmatch, Licence to Kill’s one-hit eliminations, You Only Live Twice, The Man With the Golden Gun, and The Living Daylights. Arenas are adapted from the campaign, making familiar spaces serve a different purpose when opponents can approach from every doorway. More characters and multiplayer options become available through progress in the solo game.

The game arrived after the film on which it is based, but it became one of the Nintendo 64’s defining releases. Its focused missions, controller-based aiming, four-player split-screen matches, and emphasis on objectives helped demonstrate how a first-person shooter could work on a home console. Rare later carried many related ideas into Perfect Dark for Nintendo 64, including its mission-driven approach and multiplayer foundations. GoldenEye 007 was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2025, reflecting its lasting place in the history of console shooters and shared-screen multiplayer.

This description concerns the original 1997 Nintendo 64 game. It should not be confused with the 2010 GoldenEye 007 remake, which recast the story around Daniel Craig and used different levels and modern online multiplayer, or with the 2023 availability of the original N64 version on Nintendo Switch and Xbox. For the N64 cartridge, the experience is specifically Rare’s film-inspired solo missions and same-room, up-to-four-player competition.