Two beloved games from the past have been rereleased in the last week: 2008’s nauseating sci-fi horror Dead Space has been resurrected with modern technology, and 1997’s first-person-shooter gamechanger GoldenEye 007 (pictured above) has arrived on Nintendo Switch and Xbox, looking somewhat less fresh.
Dead Space (pictured below) was not my thing – I’m too sensitive for horror (I sometimes cry at adverts). But GoldenEye 007 brings back a host of great memories for me, as it does for anyone who was playing games during the Nintendo 64 era. Try to find a millennial who doesn’t have fond recollections of gathering at that one friend’s house after school for split-screen death matches, or a Gen Xer who didn’t nearly miss a university essay deadline because of it.
My first thought, whenever a game such as this arrives anew, is always: what if it’s terrible now? Having revisited it, GoldenEye might be one of those games where you just had to play it when it first came out. Loading it up on Xbox now, you can’t help but by hyperaware of the blockiness and claustrophobia of its environments, the weird movement, the almost eerily basic character models.
All of these shortcomings were hallmarks of technical ingenuity at the time, enabling the game to run smoothly on a console with 4MB of memory. Now though, while still iconic, it looks dated. This is the case with so many landmark games of the 1980s, 90s and early 00s, and it’s why rereleases can be such a risky business. Stripped of their context, these games arrive in a future where their amazing technical innovations are commonplace, and have been improved on a hundredfold.
When it was first released, the very idea of a first-person shooter on a console was laughable; how would you control it, without a keyboard and mouse? Before GoldenEye, if you wanted to blow your friends up at a social occasion, you had to have a LAN setup with several PCs and tangles of wires (or just play Bomberman). It was Halo: Combat Evolved in 2001 (below) that really set the standard for console shooters, leading them to become a dominant genre to this day, but GoldenEye was an important step along that path. How can you explain that to someone coming in cold in 2023? There’s no way to communicate what this game meant.
Art derives its meaning not just from its form, but from its context. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is a fascinating painting, even more so when you understand it as the beginning of expressionism, tracing its influence through the following century. My feeling with early video games – and bear in mind that we’re still only 50-ish years into this medium – is that their context tends to be more important than their form. You have to understand where they came from, and be prepared to put up with their constraints. A painting is easier to appreciate in and of itself than an old game with primitive graphics and annoying controls.
And if you’ve got a historian’s eye, or a coder’s eye, it’s in some ways more interesting to see what game designers, artists and musicians of the past did with so little at their disposal than to see what sumptuous worlds today’s hundreds-strong teams create with enormous computational power. That Rare managed to create, in GoldenEye, a first-person shooter that worked at all on the Nintendo 64 – let alone one that was actually enjoyable – is incredible. Much of early game development consisted of astonishingly talented people performing miracles with the tools that they had, making things that simply couldn’t exist – until they did.
I often think about how twentysomethings Veronika Megler and Philip Mitchell managed to create the world of The Hobbit in text and basic graphics, one that even mimicked the passage of time, on a ZX Spectrum in 1982. As Megler has said: “I think solving a problem within tight constraints – which is the space we were in – unleashes a very different type of creativity. That in itself can be very powerful.”
It’s a rare retro game that is as fun to play 20-plus years on as it was when it came out. The 1990s was a particularly harsh time, too: game designers and artists had perfected 2D game design by the middle of the decade, but the low-polygon early years of 3D were difficult, as everyone got to grips with how to control a character in three dimensions. Even the classics of that time – GoldenEye among them – look and feel pretty rough now. But we can still appreciate them, through the right lens.
What to play
I spent an evening this week with Hi-Fi Rush, the rhythm-action game from The Evil Within creators Tango Gameworks that was surprise-released last week, and I was enraptured. Imagine the offspring of Jet Set Radio, Scott Pilgrim, Space Channel 5 and Devil May Cry. You play an annoying wannabe rock star transformed into a robot-smashing vigilante with a mechanical arm, on a mission to take down all the flamboyant executives of a sinister megacorp. As in the recent spate of heavy-metal first-person shooters (Metal: Hellsinger, BPM: Bullets Per Minute), attacking and moving on the beat does bonus damage and makes it all flow beautifully, and the whole world pulses to the rhythm, helping you to sink into the zone. The relentlessly upbeat rock soundtrack and absurdly stylish living comic-book art style put me in a nostalgic Japanese-games-of-the-00s happy place.
Available on: Xbox and PC, via Game Pass
Approximate playtime: 10-12 hours
What to read
I’m not the only one to have been enjoying the delights of Apple Arcade recently – Guardian games columnist Dominik Diamond has become the kind of casual smartphone gamer he might have sneered at in his youth.
So many emotions ran through me when I read that Phoebe Waller-Bridge might be writing a Tomb Raider TV series. This is perfect: TV’s poshest writer writes gaming’s poshest character. Might she actually understand Croft, and give us the version of the character that Tomb Raider’s legions of female fans have always wanted, but never had? A girl can hope. (Revisit this issue of Pushing Buttons in which I write more about Lara Croft.)
I can finally talk about the third episode of The Last of Us: an hour-and-fifteen-minute long love story about a minor character from the game, Bill. It is a beautiful portrait of the journey of long-term relationships, a touchingly ordinary story against the extraordinary backdrop of the end of the world. This episode sold me on this series, and potentially on the entire concept of TV game adaptations. It’s been renewed for a second season now; The Last of Us Part II is significantly more difficult material, and I will be interested to see how it’s handled.
What to click
GoldenEye 007: the beloved classic that reshaped video games
Can video games change people’s minds about the climate crisis?
Season review – atmospheric road trip game with a muddled message
Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! review – saddle up for eccentricity
Question block
Today’s very apt question comes from regular reader Iain: There seems to be a growing number of remastered versions of existing games, such as Final Fantasy VII. However I invest more in the original little pixel figures, perhaps because I have to use my imagination, than the “photorealistic” remastered characters. How about you?
Isn’t it amazing how a bunch of black-and-white squares representing a Charizard meant more to me than the fully-animated, beautiful 3D creatures in current Pokémon games? I think there’s definitely something to be said for your imagination filling in the gaps. It depends on the game, for me, but generally I come down on the side of restoration rather than remake: take the original art style, clean it up a bit maybe, even redo it, but don’t stray far from the source material. Sometimes attempting to modernise an older game’s visuals can actually ruin it, as Silent Hill players discovered when they played the HD Collection, only to find that the new developers had gotten rid of the town’s trademark oppressive fog, much to the original designer’s consternation. On the other hand: Bluepoint’s extraordinary renovation of Shadow of the Colossus made the whole thing look and feel like a new game without losing any of the original’s mystery, and now I actually prefer the newer one. As with any case of restoration, it’s a delicate art.
