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5 hours ago
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The year 2025 is shaping up to be a corker, isn’t it? It’s all happening: bird flu is back, we’re getting tariffs on everything, Russia has twinned with the US, and it seems there are more Nazis around than there were last month. People are even turning on Ryan Reynolds, for crying out loud.
But it’s going to be OK. Because Amazon now has creative control over James Bond.
People are clutching their pearls pretty tightly over this: they fear that Amazon will take one of the greatest film properties ever and ruin it. We’ll get watered-down televisual tribulations with the most tenuous of connections to Bond. Prequels of prequels of prequels, spin-offs with villains getting their own movies and no doubt at some point a 22-part series featuring Bond as a baby.
“Now pay attention, 007. If you pull this Velcro strap the nappy will explode!”
But I will gladly swim through that cesspool of dross daily like Sisyphus pushing his boulder if it means that we may get a successor to GoldenEye 007 on the N64. Come on! Why not? Amazon makes games. Maybe Jeff Bezos will finally decide he wants to do some good for the world and give us a sequel to the greatest multiplayer game of the 90s. It was even better than Bomberman.
I try to explain to my son how groundbreaking it was.
“It put four-player, first-person shooter action on the same screen in 1997, son. In 1997! Before Halo!”
“That frame rate is janky as all hell, though.”
“Janky? This was 1997 – 30 frames a second wasn’t a thing. Everything was essentially stop-motion.”
“Those graphics look wonky.”
“THOSE GRAPHICS ARE ART!”
“It’s not as good as Call of Duty.”
“You wouldn’t even have Call of Duty if it wasn’t for GoldenEye.”
“Oh hang on, Dad, is that Sean Bean from Game of Thrones in it?”
I try to explain that this was not only the first game to ever feature a realistic-looking Bean, but also the first where you had a working telescopic sniper rifle, the first I can remember that not only featured headshot kills, but goons that reacted properly to being shot. The game was so forward thinking it tore a hole in the very fabric of time. Maybe that’s what the Nazis used as a portal to invade 2025.
“Can you shoot hats off people in Halo, son?” I scream, not realising he had gone back to college, which is a pity, because I hadn’t even told him there was a multiplayer mode where you could run around slapping each other. It also had a cheat code that made the heads huge. We need a mod of these options that replaces everyone’s mug with that of Elon Musk, so that you can run around slapping his big face.
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N64’s GoldenEye was elegant. It had style. It had wit. Not content with giving us big head mode, it also had paintball mode, which people exclusively used to draw penises on the walls, because this was the 90s. NOTHING is more 90s than a daubed knob.
It’s one of those games that no matter where you are in the world, if it comes up in conversation, people’s faces break out in the widest grin.
The golden gun!
The complex level with the proximity mines!
Shooting guards when they are having a poo!
The game always made you smile. It made you feel anything was possible – with gaming, with entertainment, and with weekends. GoldenEye was responsible for some of my most ludicrously enjoyable Friday night multiplayer game sessions of the decade, and also my worst. Once, one of my friends turned up with a big bag of poppers, claiming it would make the game “absolutely mental”. All I knew about poppers back then was that they were something to do with the Suede song Animal Nitrate. But pop we did! It was awful. You know those camera moves you get in trendy arthouse movies where it zooms in really fast but only a part of the screen stays in focus? That was what it was like playing GoldenEye on poppers. For 60 seconds. That was how long the hit lasted. Then you got the most horrific headache. Stupid behaviour. If we get a GoldenEye sequel, I will be playing it mostly under the influence of antidepressants and thyroid medication.
But this is 2025. And we can’t have nice things. We won’t get a GoldenEye sequel because the big game publishers keep closing all their studios and firing their staff after forcing them to work on ill-advised Fortnite or Overwatch knockoffs for years. So I expect we will just get a nightmare roster of Bond mobile games instead.
Bond casino games. Rubbish Bondesque spins on Candy Crush. Infinite running James Bond games. All manner of deck-building tat and maybe a tower defence game featuring the MI5 building.
Actually that last one could be quite cool … hold my martini, I’m off to call Bezos.
