GoldenEye 007 makes the shooter work on a living room sofa

What happened

The project began as a tie-in to a film that had already been in cinemas for two years, made by a team in the English Midlands with little prior experience of the genre. What they produced bore almost no resemblance to the licensed cash-ins of the period. Missions carried layered objectives that multiplied with the difficulty setting rather than simply making enemies tougher, guards reacted differently depending on where they were hit, and the game rewarded patience and quiet approaches about as often as it rewarded shooting.

Multiplayer was added late in development and became the reason most people remember it. Four players shared one television, each with a quarter of the screen, in a mode that assumed everybody was in the same room and could hear each other complain. Rules could be adjusted, weapons restricted and characters chosen, and the resulting arguments about which options counted as fair became a fixture of dorm rooms and finished basements across North America and Britain for years afterward.

Control was the technical problem it had to solve. Aiming precisely is easy with a mouse and awkward with thumbs, and the answer used the analog stick for movement with a held button that switched into free aiming, one of several schemes the genre tried before settling on twin sticks a few years later. The game sold in the millions, an unusual outcome for a licensed product, and its influence runs directly through the console shooters that came after it.

The world at the time

Shooters in 1997 were understood as computer games, played with a keyboard and mouse and increasingly over a network. Consoles had received ports of the major titles with compromised controls. Nintendo's new machine offered an analog stick and four controller ports, but nobody had yet demonstrated what a shooter built specifically for that arrangement ought to feel like.

What it changed

The studio followed it with a spiritual successor and was eventually bought by Microsoft, which was building its own console around a shooter. Local multiplayer on a split screen remained a standard feature until online play displaced it. Licensing complications kept the game off digital storefronts for well over two decades, making it an early case study in how tangled rights can strand a work.