Right, so this is going to sound mental, but I need to tell you about the time a James Bond game basically took over my entire university experience and somehow made it brilliant. This was autumn 1997, and I’d just managed to get my hands on an N64 – proper expensive bit of kit at the time, cost me nearly three months of my weekend job money. The console came bundled with GoldenEye 007, which I’ll be honest, I wasn’t massively excited about. I mean, the film was already two years old by then, and movie tie-in games were usually absolute rubbish, weren’t they?
Christ, was I wrong about that.
I was sharing a flat with three other lads in my second year at Manchester Uni – proper student accommodation, you know the type, thin walls, thinner carpets, and a telly that was older than I was. But that ancient 21-inch CRT became the center of our universe once we discovered GoldenEye’s four-player split-screen mode. Within a week of getting the game, our flat had transformed into some sort of gaming pilgrimage site. People were showing up at all hours, controllers were going missing, and I’m pretty sure my flatmate Dave started charging people 50p each for tea and biscuits during extended gaming sessions.
Now, I need to explain something about gaming in the late ’90s that younger people might not grasp – this was revolutionary stuff. Console FPS games were practically nonexistent, and the ones that did exist were generally terrible. We’d been raised on PC shooters like Doom and Quake, which meant keyboard and mouse controls. The idea that you could have a proper shooter on a console, with four people playing simultaneously on one screen… it shouldn’t have worked. That bizarre three-pronged N64 controller looked like something designed by aliens who’d heard about human hands but never actually seen them.
Except it did work. Brilliantly.
The first time we got four controllers connected and loaded up the Facility map – that’s when it clicked. The split-screen setup meant you could see exactly what your opponents were doing, which led to this fascinating psychological element. You’d watch someone reload in their corner of the screen and immediately rush them. You’d spot someone camping with a sniper rifle and coordinate with another player to flank them. It was like playing poker where everyone’s cards were visible, but somehow that made it more strategic, not less.
We developed house rules faster than university bureaucracy creates pointless committees. First and most sacred: absolutely no Oddjob. Ever. That short bastard was basically cheating made manifest – his reduced hitbox made him nearly impossible to hit with the imprecise analog stick aiming. My mate Steve tried to argue that choosing Oddjob was a legitimate strategy, right up until he went 20-0 in a match and the rest of us nearly threw him out the window. From that point forward, accidentally selecting Oddjob resulted in immediate forfeiture of your turn and genuine mockery. We took this more seriously than our actual coursework.
The maps became as familiar as our own neighborhood. Complex with its maze-like corridors and camping spots. Temple with its multi-level madness and that perfect sniper perch everyone fought over. Archives – bloody Archives – where matches could last forever because people would just hide behind the bookshelves taking pot shots. But Facility… Facility was perfection. Balanced, memorable, with that bathroom area that became legendary for close-quarters combat. I probably spent more time learning the layout of that fictional Soviet chemical weapons facility than I did studying for my actual chemistry modules.
Screen-watching became this massive ethical debate that would make philosophy professors proud. Was it cheating to glance at other players’ screens to track their positions? We spent hours arguing this. My flatmate Paul maintained it was impossible not to see the other screens in your peripheral vision, so trying to avoid it was artificial. Dave insisted that deliberately looking at opponents’ screens was unsportsmanlike. The compromise we reached: peripheral vision was acceptable, but obvious head-turning to check other screens would result in verbal abuse and potential controller confiscation. Very sophisticated stuff.
Proximity mines… Christ, proximity mines. Someone at Rare was clearly a sadist when they programmed those things. What started as occasional tactical mine placement evolved into psychological warfare that would make MI6 proud. We learned you could stick mines to body armor spawns, weapon pickups, even the undersides of walkways. My personal specialty was placing mines on the back of doors – invisible until someone opened them, at which point… well, let’s just say I earned some very creative threats against my person.
The weapon balance was something special too. Everyone wanted the RCP-90 with its massive clip and decent damage, but the Klobb… the poor, useless Klobb. That gun was so pathetically underpowered that firing it was basically announcing your location to everyone else on the map. “I’m over here, I’m poorly armed, please come kill me.” But somehow even the terrible weapons had their place in the ecosystem.
We discovered game modes that extended the experience far beyond basic deathmatches. “The Man with the Golden Gun” became our go-to for intense, tactical gameplay – one-shot kills, single golden gun spawning randomly around the map. Pure tension. “Slappers Only” devolved into absolute chaos, four grown men chasing each other around trying to land melee hits, usually dissolving into laughter within minutes. My personal favorite was “License to Kill” with pistols only – turned every match into this tense Western standoff where positioning and patience mattered more than reflexes.
The unlockable cheats added this brilliant progression element that kept us coming back to the single-player campaign. Most of us had blasted through the story mode once and moved on to multiplayer, but unlocking new cheats meant revisiting those missions with specific time and difficulty requirements. Dave became obsessed with beating Facility on 00 Agent difficulty under 2:05 to unlock the Invincibility cheat. Watching him attempt that run for the fifteenth time, we’d all crowd around offering “helpful” commentary that mostly consisted of shouting at the television and consuming alarming quantities of cheap lager.
DK Mode – where everyone had massive heads and gorilla arms – was comedy gold. All the weapons looked ridiculous in those oversized hands, and headshots became almost impossible to miss. We’d usually break out DK Mode late in the evening when everyone was slightly drunk and the competitive edge had worn off in favor of just having a laugh.
The social aspect was everything, though. This wasn’t just about the game – it was about the entire experience. Four people crammed onto a knackered sofa, arguing over who got the good controller (the one where the analog stick wasn’t completely loose), sharing bags of crisps, taking the piss out of each other’s terrible strategies. When someone pulled off an incredible kill, everyone saw it happen. When someone died in an embarrassingly stupid way, the mockery was immediate and merciless.
By our third year, GoldenEye had basically taken over the entire student accommodation block. Other flats started challenging us to tournaments. Someone organized a proper bracket competition with teams from different floors. The finals were held in the common room with about thirty people watching, and I swear it was more intense than any football match I’ve ever attended. We treated it like the bloody World Cup.
My mate Tony developed these incredibly detailed strategies for each map, complete with hand-drawn diagrams showing optimal routes and camping spots. He’d analyze spawn patterns, weapon placement, even the timing of armor respawns. Meanwhile, I was just running around hoping to stumble into kills, but somehow Tony’s scientific approach and my chaotic style balanced each other perfectly in team matches.
The N64 controller became an extension of your hand after hundreds of hours of play. That weird three-pronged design that looked completely mental actually worked brilliantly for GoldenEye. The analog stick for movement, C-buttons for strafing and looking around, Z-trigger for firing – it all clicked together in this way that felt natural after the initial learning curve. Though I’ll admit, our controllers took an absolute battering. Analog sticks became loose, buttons started sticking, and the Z-trigger on my main controller eventually wore down to nothing, giving me this slight quick-draw advantage that led to accusations of cheating.
When Perfect Dark came out a couple years later, we all expected it to replace GoldenEye entirely. Better graphics, more weapons, customizable bots, improved everything really. But somehow… it didn’t stick the same way. Maybe we were getting older, maybe university life was winding down, or maybe there’s just something magical about your first love. Perfect Dark was objectively superior in almost every way, but it felt like trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. The passion wasn’t quite there.
Looking back now, GoldenEye represented this perfect moment in gaming history. Multiplayer console FPS was still novel enough to feel revolutionary, but online gaming hadn’t yet pulled everyone away from local multiplayer. You had to be in the same room, sharing the same screen, experiencing every triumph and failure together. The social bonds formed during those sessions lasted well beyond university – I’m still mates with most of those people, and yeah, we occasionally dust off an N64 for old times’ sake when we get together.
The remastered version that came out recently is perfectly fine, but it’s missing something essential. Playing online with my old university friends over voice chat was nostalgic, but it wasn’t the same. You lose that immediate physical reaction – the satisfied grin when you land an impossible shot, the genuine frustration when someone gets you with a cheap proximity mine kill, the ability to actually threaten physical violence against your opponents while sharing the same sofa.
I sometimes wonder what my university experience would’ve been like without GoldenEye. Probably would’ve spent more time studying, possibly gotten better grades. But those late-night gaming sessions created friendships and memories that have lasted decades. For all the jokes about ruined academic performance, I can’t imagine trading those experiences for slightly better marks in modules I can barely remember taking.
GoldenEye wasn’t just entertainment – it was a social institution that defined my university years. While I’ve played technically superior games since then, none captured that perfect combination of innovation, social interaction, and pure fun that made four people crowd around a tiny television screen for hours on end. Sometimes the stars just align perfectly, and for a brief moment in the late ’90s, a game based on a two-year-old Bond film became the center of our universe. And honestly? Wouldn’t change a thing about it.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
