GoldenEye 007

Four friends crammed around a single television, a split screen, one of them shouting „stop looking at my window!" – if you lived through the late nineties with a Nintendo 64, this scene is as inseparable from GoldenEye 007 as Bond is from a martini. This first-person shooter went down in history not only as a surprisingly brilliant film adaptation, but as a title that rewrote the rules of the genre on consoles.

Until then, the accepted wisdom was that shooters belonged to the PC with its mouse and keyboard. GoldenEye proved that an FPS could not only work on a console but be superb. The single-player campaign, based on the Bond film, offered missions with clever structure – it wasn't just about running and gunning, but about completing objectives, using various tools and proceeding tactically. Stealth, sniping and loud action all had their place.

The real legend, though, was the four-player split-screen multiplayer. Arena battles with familiar weapons and characters from the Bond world became synonymous with the gaming parties of an entire generation. It wasn't about online connections or leaderboards – it was about people in one room, face-to-face rivalry and endless „just one more match". This form of shared fun is still praised today as one of the peaks of couch multiplayer.

The game also advanced how shooters handled aiming, hit zones and enemy behaviour. A headshot worked differently from a shot to the leg, enemies reacted more believably, and the overall feel of shooting had real weight. Many of these ideas later became a standard we now take for granted.

As a film licence that far exceeded expectations, GoldenEye 007 is proof that an adaptation need not be a slapdash cash-in. Instead it became a milestone that entire generations of players remember fondly and that shaped the direction of console shooters for years to come.

Why play it: Because it is the iconic console shooter that defined the FPS on the Nintendo 64, and whose four-player split-screen multiplayer is still legendary at gaming parties.