Gold has long held a special place in the James Bond franchise. It was Goldfinger, the third film in the EON-produced series, that established many of the elements we now consider essential to the Bond formula in 1964. From the gadget-packed Aston Martin DB5 to the full pre-credit sequence and a pounding gold-soaked title sequence, many of its innovations were soon inseparable from the superspy's adventures.

For many fans who discovered Bond in the 80s or 90s, though, the first gold they might associate with Bond isn't plating a Rolls-Royce or a gleaming gun. It's the special edition gold controller that came bundled with GoldenEye 007—the hugely successful game of the 17th Bond film released on the Nintendo 64 in 1997.

When the film GoldenEye was released in 1995, following the series' first hiatus since it began with Dr No in 1962, it set out to update the ‘Cold War dinosaur' for the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and did so with great success. But it also inadvertently turned the British superspy into a multimedia icon, thanks to the groundbreaking game that revolutionised console gaming. So, as Pierce Brosnan's 007 debut turns 30, how much of GoldenEye's legacy is thanks to the game it inspired?

Reinventing James Bond For The 1990s

Six years after Licence to Kill had taken Bond in a brutal direction heavily influenced by ‘80s action films, director Martin Campbell took the reins to reintroduce the spy to cinema. Bond had merrily exploited movie trends for decades, from the Blaxploitation of 1973's Live and Let Die to the Star Wars response of 1979's Moonraker, but the 1995 reinvention drew on the innate strength of Ian Fleming's hero to meet the fast-approaching new century. There's a compelling theory about Bond reboots that Amazon MGM Studios should be studying with a microfilm viewer: just go back to basics. That approach was confirmed when Campbell was called on to refresh the franchise once again with Casino Royale 11 years later.

GoldenEye may have presented an authentically Fleming 007, but it was also the first Bond film not to take any plot points from the writer's original sequence of 12 novels and two short story collections. The reassuring ‘Gold' and a slew of nods to Bond history were there, but it ran headfirst into a story of theft, intrigue, and betrayal packed with action, stunts, a tank chase, and trips to Russia, Monaco and South America, helping it hurdle the end of the Cold War. It received a positive reception in November 1995, but subsequent decades have crowned it as one of the all-time best Bond outings. Its reputation is almost as good as that of the video game it inspired.

Finally Making It In Games

James Bond had been in video games since 1982's text adventure Shaken but Not Stirred. But with the 14th entry, a Nintendo 64 exclusive, Bond ran into first-person shooters (FPSs) and the annals of videogame history. Not that anyone would have guessed how big GoldenEye 007 would become from its humble beginnings.

The late 1990s were a difficult time for Nintendo, as Sony's PlayStation dominated the console market. It was enough for the company that gave us Mario, Yoshi, and Kirby to ease up on its strict restrictions on more adult material. GoldenEye 007 was pitched as a side-scrolling platform game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, but the inexperienced team at developer Rare managed its evolution to an on-rails shooter and then a 3D shooter that could take advantage of the console's 64-bit architecture. They had support and ambition. As the team told N64 Magazine, they not only had access to the GoldenEye set at Leavesden, but “all the designs, model shots and all the plans”. While in the lab, they took inspiration from games like the PC FPS Doom (1993). By combining both, Rare hit gold.

GoldenEye 007 didn't arrive until two years after GoldenEye's release, when Brosnan's Bond was moving onto his second outing as the superspy, Tomorrow Never Dies. The delay didn't matter. Fans soon discovered how well the game brought the James Bond experience to consoles. 

GoldenEye 007: A New Bond Experience

Rare brilliantly translated the film's plot, splitting into diverse levels in a compelling single-player campaign. Capturing the Bond essence isn't easy, as many Bond games before and since have proved. The studio also made some great choices, including bringing on board two experienced Nintendo composers to provide an atmospheric soundtrack, and insisting that when Bond died in the game, the classic bars rang out and blood descended over a gun barrel. It oozed 007 (even if some of that sat uneasily with Nintendo).

Heaped with atmosphere, GoldenEye blended superb gameplay with a sharp interpretation of the movie's plot. Its level design was ingenious, and its weaponry tactile—the scoped sniper rifle and the dual-wieldable but awkward Klobb both delivered memorable moments for wholly different reasons. Most of all, it delivered addictively fun split-screen multiplayer. 

Deathmatches were GoldenEye 007's true success, allowing up to four players to compete in several scenarios via split-screen (albeit on the same console where you could develop tactics based on seeing your rivals' screens). The play modes wittily drew from Bond history—You Only Live Twice gave players two lives before they are eliminated from the game, while Licence to Kill gave everyone one-shot kills—and players could compete as classic avatars from Bond history, including Oddjob, Jaws and Baron Samedi. Bond fans could finally slip into the Q-branch issue shoes of their hero, just as a new film came out.

Flying in under the radar like a HALO jump, GoldenEye 007 emerged to rave reviews and unexpectedly became the third biggest selling game on the N64, just after Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64, no less. Nintendo soon bundled the game with consoles (and that gold controller), and thanks to critical acclaim and sales of an incredible 8 million copies, Bond was suddenly a major gaming icon.

Late 1997 was undoubtedly a peak time for Bond fans, but the game's legacy didn't stop there.

A Game That Enhanced The Film

GoldenEye is packed with fantastic action, intrigue and character moments, like Bond's legendary confrontation with his new boss, where Dame Judi Dench's M takes him down a peg. It was a memorable sign of the times, but for a Bond fan, that's just as iconic as selecting the Facility level in GoldenEye 007's multiplayer. For many, the way a door opens, the position of cameras, and the irritating advantage of Oddjob's height will live in their mind just as long as any Campbell-directed sequence.

GoldenEye 007 allowed players to obsess over the film's locations like no Bond game before or since. Nobody has done it better. Playing the game made players think of the film, but thanks to Rare's brilliant interpretation, the opposite was also true. The Facility level allowed players to explore the Soviet chemical weapons facility from the film's opening sequence, including the iconic toilets and jail cells, while Bunker made a maze of the grey corridors based on Bond's movie escape. 

How GoldenEye 007 Changed The Industry

GoldenEye 007 triggered an industry earthquake. It established that FPSs, long the preserve of PCs, could work on consoles, setting a reputation that couldn't be shaken or stirred. The team's inexperience meant it pushed boundaries, quietly revolutionising the genre, with use of the analogue controller, stealth sections and groundbreaking enemy AI. Microsoft bought Rare in 2002, but the developer's Bond mission had been completed long before. Electronic Arts gained the rights when GoldenEye 007‘s huge success pushed the price up. EA's Tomorrow Never Dies game was released on PlayStation in 1999, with a third-person perspective and nowhere near the critical reception of its predecessor. Rare, meanwhile, had siphoned off their achievement into an IP of their own, Perfect Dark, which is a whole other story.

The games that followed couldn't match Rare's achievement, so it was only a matter of time before GoldenEye 007 resurfaced. Following the over-the-top Everything or Nothing in 2004, EA bit the bullet and announced a ‘sequel.' GoldenEye: Rogue Agent was an enjoyable riff on the name, with players playing a dark version of Bond. In an alternate continuity, this fallen MI6 agent had a synthetic golden eye upgraded with special abilities by weapons breaker Francisco Scaramanga amid a power struggle between Auric Goldfinger and Dr No. Fun as it sounds, the cynical use of the GoldenEye name underscored the weight of the 1997 game's achievement.

More evidence of GoldenEye 007's reputation came in 2010. Activision's remake updated the game for modern consoles, with Daniel Craig's likeness replacing Brosnan's and some fascinating upgrades to the original story, penned by GoldenEye's co-writer Bruce Feirstein. Despite being just 15 years after the film's release, it strained credulity that Trevelyan was motivated by his Cossack heritage. Instead, he acted in response to the UK government's management of the recent financial crash. Reflecting the tougher era of Bond, Craig's 007 didn't bungee jump from the dam. He jumped.

Subsequently, the 1997 version of GoldenEye 007 has been remastered, finding its way onto Xbox (Rare is still a subsidiary of Microsoft) as well as, of course, Nintendo Switch.

GoldenEye's Rising Stock

GoldenEye isn't a film that's ever needed reappraisal. Instead, its stock has continued to climb over the past three decades. In 2025, as we wait for a new reinvention, classic Bond films are creeping onto 4K collector sets, enhancing the way fans consume 007's adventures through film, music and books (GoldenEye was novelised in 1995). But Brosnan's debut is unique. Unlike any other Bond film, the game adaptation, in all its forms, plausibly remains the main way fans explore the story, continually shaping and extending its reach into popular culture. 

GoldenEye 007 is as inseparable from GoldenEye as vodka from vermouth in a martini.

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