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. Photograph: MicrosoftĪnd 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. Halo: Combat Evolved’s anniversary edition. A painting is easier to appreciate in and of itself than an old game with primitive graphics and annoying controls.
You have to understand where they came from, and be prepared to put up with their constraints.
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. 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. How can you explain that to someone coming in cold in 2023? There’s no way to communicate what this game meant.Īrt derives its meaning not just from its form, but from its context. 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. 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). Stripped of their context, these games arrive in a future where their amazing technical innovations are commonplace, and have been improved on a hundredfold. 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. Now though, while still iconic, it looks dated. Photograph: Electronic ArtsĪll of these shortcomings were hallmarks of technical ingenuity at the time, enabling the game to run smoothly on a console with 4MB of memory.
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