TL;DR
- What it is: Rare’s 1997 N64 FPS based on the 1995 Bond film, directed by Martin Hollis
- Platform/Price: N64 cart ~£20 boxed; included in Nintendo Switch Online N64 app
- Dad Filter verdict: Buy — the split-screen is still the reason to own an N64
- One thing to know: Nine people made this. Nine.
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What It Is
GoldenEye 007 is a first-person shooter developed by Rare in Twycross, England and published by Nintendo in August 1997. It was directed by Martin Hollis on a team that fluctuated between six and nine people depending on the week. Based on the 1995 Pierce Brosnan Bond film, the single-player campaign takes you through 20 levels with stealth, sniping, keycard-hunting, and occasional spectacular set pieces — the dam opening, the tank in St Petersburg, the Cradle finale. The four-way split-screen multiplayer is the thing everyone actually remembers, and for good reason: it turned the N64 from a machine you owned into a machine you threw parties around.
The specific context matters. In 1997 FPS games belonged on PC. Console FPS games were rare, awkward, and almost universally poor. GoldenEye shipped into that gap and solved the problem. The control scheme — C-buttons to look, analogue stick to move — was not perfect but was workable, and the multiplayer modes (Normal, You Only Live Twice, License to Kill, Man with the Golden Gun, The Living Daylights) gave couch-based competitive gaming a structure that did not exist before. Twenty-eight million copies sold. A generation of British teenagers lost entire weekends.
Why This One Matters To Me
The specific memory I have of GoldenEye is a Friday night in late 1997 at my friend Paul’s house. Four pads, a small CRT, his parents’ living room, a bowl of Monster Munch between us. Stack — the level, a multi-storey warehouse — became our entire world for about four months. Everyone had a role. Everyone had an opinion on which character was fastest (it was Oddjob, and using Oddjob was cheating). Everyone had at least one catastrophic ‘I was in the toilet, how did you already win’ grievance they would air repeatedly.
This is the textbook example of a game that is more than the sum of its parts. The graphics were never good — the characters look like angular gingerbread men, the texture work is blotchy, the frame rate dips under four-player load. None of that mattered. The level design of Facility, Stack, Complex, and Temple was so tuned that every match had a dozen real tactical decisions, and the multiplayer mode variety meant nobody was ever playing the same thing for long.
Coming back to it in 2026, the single-player is the surprise. I remembered the multiplayer and assumed the campaign was forgettable. It is not. The stealth sections are genuinely thoughtful. The objective-based level design — which the industry has been rediscovering with Hitman and Dishonored — was worked out here first, by nine people, on a machine with 4MB of RAM. Dam alone (the first level) has more design ideas per square foot than most modern AAA levels have in their entire runtime.
My boys surprised me. I expected them to bounce off the graphics immediately. The ten-year-old gave it a fair five minutes before declaring it ‘a bit blocky’ and then losing an hour to Facility. The seven-year-old was obsessed with Slappers Only multiplayer within about three minutes. This is a family game in the 2026 sense — the specific sense that four controllers and one telly still produces something modern online games cannot replicate.
The Dad Filter
Worth Full Price?
Buy. The Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack tier includes GoldenEye in its N64 app, which is the recommended way to play in 2026 — no cartridge hunting, no composite-to-HDMI adapter, plays on any modern TV. If you have that subscription, you already own it.
A boxed N64 cart is £20 to £40 depending on condition, plus the cost of an N64 (around £50-80 on eBay) and a working set of controllers. Fine for the collector — expensive for the casual return player. Switch Online is the sane choice.
Kid Appeal
Medium. Modern kids will notice the graphics immediately. Give them five minutes with multiplayer and the complaint stops. The level geometry has enough verticality and surprise to hold attention once they are in it.
The single-player is PEGI 12 content — Bond-style violence, no gore — and the multiplayer skews younger in tone than any modern FPS. This is a game you can hand a ten-year-old without worrying.
Parent Tolerance
High. The single-player is surprisingly thoughtful — stealth, objectives, pacing. The multiplayer is exactly as fun in 2026 as it was in 1997 because the maps are that well-tuned.
Play the soundtrack loud. Grant Kirkhope’s score was genuinely excellent and is still inexplicably underrated in FPS soundtrack conversations.
Family Play Value
Essential. This is the entire point of the game. Four controllers, one screen, one household. Different match types keep the format fresh. The skill range between adults and kids is manageable because accuracy does not matter as much as position.
There is no modern four-way split-screen FPS with this level of quality. None. Modern shooters have abandoned couch multiplayer almost entirely. GoldenEye is therefore one of the few games that still does this specific thing — and does it better than anything since.
Time Respect
Good. Single-player missions are 15 to 30 minutes each. Multiplayer matches are 3 to 10. The game saves progress per mission, and the multiplayer does not need saving at all — it is a pick-up-and-play format.
A family session is naturally bounded at about 45 minutes before attention starts to fracture. That is exactly the right length.
Replay Chances
High. 007 difficulty adds constraints to the campaign. Multiplayer is effectively infinite. Unlock cheats (paintball mode, DK mode, 2x turbo) genuinely extend replay value. Speedrunning has a huge community built around this game alone.
Twenty-eight years on, there are adults who pick GoldenEye up twice a year and still find something new in it. That is the mark of a genuine classic.
The Verdict
Buy. GoldenEye 007 on N64 is one of the small number of retro games where the original experience is the reason to return to it. The Switch Online version preserves it faithfully and eliminates the hardware hunt. The core loop — four controllers, one screen, an hour of shouting — has not been meaningfully bettered by any modern multiplayer FPS.
Rare at its peak was one of the most technically and design-wise impressive studios anywhere in the world. Nine people built a game that sold 28 million copies, defined a genre on console, and is still being played 28 years later. That is not a sentence you can write about many teams working today.
If you can set up a night with four controllers and four people who remember this game, do it. If you cannot, the single-player campaign is genuinely worth a return visit. If you are handing this to kids who have never seen it, lead with multiplayer — the single-player campaign can come later, if at all. This is a family gaming classic, and almost everything about that status is still true.
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- The Dad Filter Manifesto — How and why I review games as a dad, not a gamer.