GoldenEye 007 is a 1997 first-person shooter game created by Rare and released by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. It is based on the 1995 James Bond movie GoldenEye, and players control James Bond to stop a criminal group from using a satellite weapon. Players move through different levels to complete tasks, such as finding or destroying items, while fighting enemies. In the multiplayer mode, up to four players compete in deathmatch games using a split-screen display.
Development started in January 1995. A team that was not very experienced, led by Martin Hollis, worked on the game for two and a half years. The game was first planned as a side-scrolling platformer for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System but later changed to a 3D shooter for the Nintendo 64, inspired by games like Doom (1993) and Virtua Cop (1994). Rare visited the set of the GoldenEye movie for ideas, and Eon Productions and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) allowed them to add scenes and characters not in the film.
GoldenEye 007 was released in Japan on August 23, 1997, in North America on August 25, 1997, and in the United Kingdom on November 7, 1997. It came out two years after the movie but just before the movie’s sequel, Tomorrow Never Dies. At first, the game had low expectations from game reviewers. However, it was highly praised and sold more than eight million copies, becoming the third best-selling Nintendo 64 game. The game was recognized for its graphics, variety of gameplay, and multiplayer mode. In 1998, it won the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award and four awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.
GoldenEye 007 showed that home consoles could be used for first-person shooter games and marked a change from games like Doom to a more realistic style. It introduced features such as atmospheric single-player missions, widescreen gameplay, stealth actions, and console multiplayer deathmatch. The game is considered one of the most important and greatest video games ever made. Many of its elements, like the Klobb gun, have had a lasting impact on video game culture. A later game called Perfect Dark, which is similar in style, was released in 2000. A remake of GoldenEye 007, made by Eurocom, came out in 2010. The original game was released again in January 2023 on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S through Xbox Game Pass, and on Nintendo Switch via the Nintendo Classics service.
Gameplay
GoldenEye 007 is a video game where players control James Bond, a secret agent, through a series of levels. In each level, players must complete tasks such as finding items, destroying objects, defeating enemies, or rescuing people. Some tasks require using special tools, like Bond’s electromagnetic watch to get a key from a jail cell. Players start with limited supplies but can collect weapons and bullets from enemies they defeat. There are no items to heal the player, but armor can be found to help protect against damage.
The game includes more than 20 weapons, such as pistols, submachine guns, rifles, grenades, and knives. Most weapons have a limited number of bullets and need to be reloaded after firing several shots. Some weapons can use the same type of bullets, like pistols and submachine guns. Weapons cause different amounts of damage depending on where they hit the enemy. Shots to the head cause the most damage, while shots to the arms or legs cause the least. The Klobb, a submachine gun with a foldable stock, fires quickly and spreads bullets widely but is hard to control due to strong recoil. Players can use two Klobbs at once for more power. Hiding is often useful because loud gunfire can alert enemies and cause more problems. Some weapons have features like silencers to reduce noise or scopes to aim better.
Each level can be played on three difficulty levels: Agent, Secret Agent, and 00 Agent. These settings change how tough enemies are, how much ammunition is available, and how many tasks must be completed. Players can unlock two bonus levels by finishing the game on the hardest difficulty. They can also replay levels within certain time limits to earn special options, like unlimited bullets or being unable to be hurt. After completing the game on all difficulty levels, players can customize how hard a level is by adjusting enemy strength, speed, accuracy, and damage.
The game includes a multiplayer mode where up to four players can compete in different game types on split-screen. These include Normal, You Only Live Twice, The Living Daylights, The Man With the Golden Gun, and Licence to Kill. In Normal, players earn points by killing others and can play as individuals or teams. In You Only Live Twice, players have two chances before being eliminated. In Licence to Kill, players are eliminated with a single hit. The Klobb is especially useful in this mode because it fires many bullets quickly.
In The Man With the Golden Gun, a single Golden Gun is placed in a fixed spot. Once picked up, the only way to get it back is by defeating the player holding it. In The Living Daylights, a flag is placed in a fixed spot, and the player who holds it the longest wins. The flag carrier cannot use weapons but can pick them up to stop opponents from collecting bullets. Players can choose levels, characters, weapons, and game length for each match. Additional levels and characters become available as players complete the single-player game.
Plot
In 1986, in Arkhangelsk, Soviet Union, MI6 discovered a secret chemical weapons facility at the Byelomorye Dam. James Bond and fellow 00-agent Alec Trevelyan were sent to enter the facility and place explosive charges. During the mission, General Arkady Ourumov shot Alec Trevelyan. James Bond escaped by taking control of an airplane.
Five years later, in 1991, Bond was sent to investigate a satellite control station in Severnaya, Russia, where programmer Boris Grishenko worked. In 1993, Bond looked into an unscheduled missile test in Kyrgyzstan, which was suspected to hide the launch of a satellite called GoldenEye. This satellite uses a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to disable electrical systems on Earth. As Bond left the missile silo, he was attacked by General Ourumov and Russian soldiers. Ourumov escaped during the attack.
In 1995, Bond traveled to Monte Carlo to investigate the frigate La Fayette. There, he rescued hostages and placed a tracker bug on a Pirate helicopter before it was stolen by the Janus crime syndicate. Bond was later sent to Severnaya again. During the mission, he was captured and locked in a bunker with Natalya Simonova, a computer programmer who refused to work with Janus. They escaped moments before the facility was destroyed by the GoldenEye satellite’s EMP, as ordered by Ourumov.
Bond then went to Saint Petersburg to meet with former KGB agent Valentin Zukovsky, who introduced him to the leader of the Janus organization. This person was revealed to be Alec Trevelyan, who had supposedly been killed by Ourumov in the Arkhangelsk facility but had actually faked his death.
Bond and Natalya escaped from Trevelyan but were arrested by Russian police and taken for questioning. Bond later escaped from interrogation, rescued Natalya, and spoke with Defence Minister Dimitri Mishkin, who confirmed Bond’s claim about Ourumov’s betrayal. Natalya was recaptured by General Ourumov, and Bond chased him through the streets of St. Petersburg to an arms depot used by Janus. There, Bond destroyed the weapons and boarded Trevelyan’s ex-Soviet missile train, where he killed Ourumov and rescued Natalya. However, Alec Trevelyan and his ally Xenia Onatopp fled to their secret base in Cuba.
Natalya joined Bond in the Caribbean. From the air, they spotted the Cuban jungle, but their small plane was shot down. Unharmed, Bond and Natalya searched the heavily guarded jungle but were ambushed by Xenia, who was killed by Bond. Bond led Natalya to the control center to disrupt signals to the GoldenEye satellite, forcing it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. He then followed Trevelyan through flooded caves to the antenna of the control center’s radio telescope. Trevelyan tried to realign the antenna to contact GoldenEye, but Bond destroyed key equipment and defeated Trevelyan in a gunfight on a platform above the dish.
Development
GoldenEye 007 was created by the British game studio Rare and directed by Martin Hollis, who had worked as a second programmer on the coin-op version of Killer Instinct. In November 1994, after Nintendo and Rare discussed making a game based on the upcoming James Bond film GoldenEye, Hollis told Tim Stamper, Rare's managing director, that he wanted to join the project. Because of the success of Rare’s 1994 game Donkey Kong Country, GoldenEye 007 was first planned as a 2D platformer for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. However, Hollis suggested making a 3D shooting game for the new Nintendo 64 console. He wrote a document with ideas for gadgets, weapons, characters, story changes from the film, and artificial intelligence (AI) that would react to the player’s actions.
Rare said that Sega’s 1994 light gun game Virtua Cop, id Software’s 1993 game Doom, and the Nintendo 64 launch game Super Mario 64 influenced GoldenEye 007. Features like gun reloading, animations that show when a player hits an enemy, penalties for killing innocent characters, and an aiming system using the R button on the Nintendo 64 controller were inspired by Virtua Cop. The team considered having players reload weapons by unplugging and reinserting the Rumble Pak on the controller, but Nintendo refused this idea. The idea of having different goals in each mission came from the variety of tasks in Super Mario 64.
The team visited the GoldenEye film’s studios multiple times to get photos and blueprints of the sets. Eon Productions and MGM, the companies that own the James Bond films, gave Rare permission to use the film’s material. Many game levels were changed or added to let players experience scenes not in the movie. Even though they used the film’s material for realism, the team also added new details to improve the game. Films by John Woo, like Hard Boiled, influenced the game’s visual effects and action scenes. Features like bullet holes on walls, gun cartridges being ejected, and explosions were part of the design. Hollis wanted players to see clear effects in the environment when they shot.
The team thought about using both on-rails (fixed paths) and free-roaming (open movement) game modes because they were unsure how the Nintendo 64 controller would work. The gas plant level was designed with a fixed path in mind. A modified Sega Saturn controller was used for early playtesting. At first, the team focused only on creating interesting spaces. Level design, like where players start and exit, and where characters and goals are placed, came later. Hollis said this unplanned method made levels feel realistic and not strictly linear, with some rooms unrelated to the main mission. After finishing the levels, the team created models for about 40 James Bond gadgets from the films and tried to use them in each level.
Work on GoldenEye 007 began in January 1995 with a team hired by Hollis: programmer Mark Edmonds, background artist Karl Hilton, and character artist B. Jones. Edmonds worked on a game engine that could turn 3D art into data for the Nintendo 64. Hilton designed levels based on the film’s material, while Jones created characters using photos and costumes. Because Nintendo had not yet given Rare the final details about the Nintendo 64, the team used an SGI Onyx workstation and Nintendo’s NINGEN software to guess the console’s capabilities. Later, designer Duncan Botwood joined the team to build levels. The first year focused on creating art and developing the engine, which at first only allowed the player and enemies to move in a virtual space.
After the first year, Rare added more staff to the project. Designer David Doak joined to help with level design and AI programming. He explained how stealth features worked: "If you shot a gun, it would alert nearby enemies. If you shot again quickly, it would alert even more enemies. If you stopped firing, the timer would reset." Windows in the game were programmed so enemies couldn’t see through them, even though this was not realistic. This encouraged players to use windows to spy on enemies.
Six months later, Hollis hired another programmer, Steve Ellis, who helped with many parts of the game and created cheat options. Ellis was mainly responsible for the multiplayer mode, which was added about six months before the game’s release. Doak said, "Ellis took the code from the single-player game and turned it into a multiplayer game." The team tested the multiplayer mode late into the night. Some multiplayer levels were based on single-player missions, but not all supported four players because they were not designed for multiplayer action. A firing range was created but not added to the final game.
The team assumed they could use anything from the James Bond universe, so the multiplayer mode included characters from previous Bond films. Actors who played Bond in earlier films were playable during development, but they were removed because Rare could not get permission to use Sean Connery’s likeness. However, the player select screen with the actors’ likenesses remained in the game, though it could only be accessed with cheat devices. Most weapons were modeled after real guns, like the Walther PPK, AK-74, and FN P90. The Klobb weapon was inspired by the Škorpion, a Czech submachine gun. Its name honored Ken Lobb, Rare’s Nintendo contact. Another weapon, the DD44 Dostovei (based on the Tokarev pistol), was named after Doak’s initials. Adrian Smith, the game’s third artist, created visual effects like muzzle flashes and explosions. He said the 1995 film Heat influenced his work.
The final Nintendo 64 hardware could render 3D shapes faster than the SGI Onyx workstation the team used. This helped the developers, as some backgrounds on the Onyx ran at only 2 frames per second without enemies or objects. Textures had to be reduced by half. Hilton explained how they improved performance: "Many parts of GoldenEye are in black and white. Color textures use more processing power. Using greyscale allowed double the resolution. If I needed a little color, I added it to the vertices." When Super Mario 64 was released in 1996, its 3D collision detection system influenced Hollis because GoldenEye 007 had originally used a 2D method.
The music was mostly composed by Graeme Norgate and Grant Kirkhope. Norgate had written music for Blast Corps, while Kirkhope composed music for Donkey Kong Land 2. Robin Beanland, the third composer, only wrote elevator music for certain levels. All sound effects were
Reception
GoldenEye 007 was not expected to be successful by many in the gaming industry. It did not perform well at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Atlanta in 1997. However, the game received praise from critics and became a commercial success. In its first month of release in the United States, it was the second most popular home console video game, after Star Fox 64. It stayed in the top five best-selling games for the rest of 1997. In 1998, the game remained in the top ten best-selling games in the United States, selling about 2.1 million copies. By July 1999, it was still in the top 20 best-selling games. By 2001, the game had sold over seven million copies worldwide. Overall, GoldenEye 007 sold more than eight million copies globally, making it the third best-selling Nintendo 64 game, after Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64. According to a report from the Entertainment Software Association, the game earned $250 million worldwide, more than 70% of the movie's box office revenue, even though it only used 3.3% of the movie's budget.
The game’s graphics were praised for having detailed environments, realistic animations, and special effects like transparent glass and smoke that lingered. Nintendo Power said the multiplayer mode had a smooth frame rate, but Electronic Gaming Monthly noted the game sometimes felt slow or unsteady. The zoomable sniper rifle was a standout feature, described by Edge as a "novel twist" and by GameSpot as a tool that helped players see through fog. The music was praised for including the "James Bond Theme" and adding atmosphere. Some levels started in elevators, with music changing from elevator tunes to full soundtracks, which GameSpot said showed attention to detail.
The gameplay was noted for its complexity and focus on stealth and strategy, rather than just fast action. IGN’s Doug Perry said the game "blends smart strategy with fast-action gunplay." Greg Sewart of Gaming Age said players had freedom in how they completed missions. Reviewers liked the variety of weapons and missions, which kept the game interesting. Controls were easier to use than in earlier games like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, but some found the targeting system hard to learn. GameRevolution said the gameplay felt realistic but criticized the campaign for being poorly paced. The game assumed players had seen the movie, which could confuse some players.
At the time, GoldenEye 007 was considered the best multiplayer game on the Nintendo 64, slightly better than Mario Kart 64, according to IGN. Edge called it addictive and praised its creative scenarios, like "You Only Live Twice." GamePro said the multiplayer modes would keep players playing with friends all year, and Next Generation highlighted the many multiplayer options, calling the game "a surprising killer app" because of its multiplayer features. The single-player game was also praised for being well-designed. GamePro called it "one of the best movie-to-game translations ever," noting the use of Bond’s gadgets and weapons. Crispin Boyer of Electronic Gaming Monthly said Rare included everything that made James Bond famous in the game.
GoldenEye 007 won several awards, including the BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award in 1998 and four awards from the AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards: "Interactive Title of the Year," "Console Game of the Year," "Console Action Game of the Year," and "Outstanding Achievement in Software Engineering." It was also nominated for "Outstanding Achievement in Art/Graphics" and "Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Design." Electronic Gaming Monthly named it "Most Addictive Game" and "Best Movie to Game" in their 1998 Video Game Buyer’s Guide, and "Game of the Year" in their Editor’s Choice Awards. Rare won the BAFTA award for Best UK Developer.
Legacy
GoldenEye 007 is known for showing that it is possible to make a fun first-person shooter game for home consoles, both for one player and for multiple players. When it was released, most first-person shooter games were made for computers. This game helped bring the genre to consoles and made it easier for later games like Halo and Call of Duty to become popular. The game introduced a multiplayer deathmatch mode on a console, which many say changed the genre. Edge magazine said it set a standard for multiplayer console games until Halo: Combat Evolved came out in 2001. GoldenEye 007 also added stealth elements that were new to first-person shooters. Its realistic gameplay, which was different from earlier games like Doom, and its ability to hit enemies in specific places added a new level of realism. The 1996 Team Fortress mod for Quake had already introduced headshots, but GoldenEye 007 was the first to use them in a major game. Along with MDK, a 1997 third-person shooter by Shiny Entertainment, GoldenEye 007 helped make scoped sniper rifles a common feature in video games. The game’s mission design, enemy AI, and stealth gameplay influenced later games like Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Syphon Filter, and Deus Ex.
GoldenEye 007 is often called one of the greatest video games of all time. In 1997, Electronic Gaming Monthly ranked it the 25th-best console game ever. In 1999, Next Generation editors placed it at No. 10 on their list of the Top 50 Games of All Time. In 2000, readers of Computer and Video Games ranked it first in their poll of the 100 Greatest Games of All Time. In 2001, Game Informer ranked it 16th on its list of Top 100 Games of All Time. In 2004, Retro Gamer readers voted it the 33rd-greatest retro game. In 2005, IGN editors ranked it 29th on their list of Top 100 Games of All Time, while readers placed it seventh. In 2009, Official Nintendo Magazine ranked it 55th on a list of greatest Nintendo games.
Edge magazine has included GoldenEye 007 in many "greatest game" lists. It was ranked third in a 2000 poll, listed as one of the top ten shooters in 2003, and placed at No. 17 in a 2007 poll. Edge gave the game a score of 9 out of 10 when it was released but later said it should have received the highest score. With eight million copies sold, GoldenEye 007 helped the Nintendo 64 compete with the PlayStation, though Nintendo eventually lost market share. GamePro called it the "console killer app" of the 1990s and the best licensed game from a movie. Nintendo Power said its multiplayer mode was one of the greatest multiplayer experiences on Nintendo systems.
In a review, Nintendo Life editor Mark Reece gave GoldenEye 007 a score of 8 out of 10. He said the multiplayer mode is still fun, but the graphics, sound, and aiming system feel outdated. He noted that the game’s difficulty settings made it replayable, a feature rarely used today. NME journalist Mark Beaumont praised the game’s graphics, enemy damage based on location, and multiplayer mode, saying it helped make gaming a group activity.
In 2011, the game was included in the Art of Video Games exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2023, Hard Drive called GoldenEye the best N64 game, saying it set the standard for first-person shooters and inspired many later games. In 2025, The Strong National Museum of Play added GoldenEye 007 to its World Video Game Hall of Fame. A museum official said critics praised it as the best first-person shooter on a console and one of the best multiplayer experiences on Nintendo systems.
During development, the weapon called the Klobb was first named Skorpion VZ/61 after its real-world version but had to change names because of legal issues. It was renamed "Spyder" but had to change again because the name was already trademarked. Finally, it was called Klobb, after a producer at Rare. Critics later said the Klobb was memorable, even though it had low damage and was hard to aim. Edge magazine said using the Klobb in dual-wield mode was satisfying and added realism. Eurogamer noted that GoldenEye 007 was one of the first games to use real gun names for in-game weapons, which caused issues later in games about real armed forces.
The Klobb was also used in other games. In Perfect Dark, the KL01313 is a weapon that looks like the Klobb. In the remastered versions of GoldenEye 007, the Kl-033 Mk2 is a submachine gun that references the original Klobb. The name "Klobb" also appeared in State of Decay, where it was a nickname for the Skorpion weapon. An Xbox Live Arcade remaster of GoldenEye 007 was planned in 2008 but was not completed.