Email: Goldeneye

Goldeneye sold over eight million units. Quake II, which came out the same year, sold just over one million, and it was one of the highest-selling PC FPSes of all time for years. I’m sure you’ve got an excuse for why Goldeneye’s blockbuster sales and undeniable influence on the FPS genre don’t make it an important game. You’ve always got some version of special pleading to explain why some niche game that only appealed to a few people was way, way, way more of an “entertainment phenomenon” than a game that came out at the same time, sold ten times as many units, and defined the genre for years and years afterward.

 

You really should apply your rule of looking at what people actually do and what kind of products actually succeed instead of carving out special exceptions for 1990s PC games that only like 50,000 people ever bought. The fact that is Goldeneye mattered far more than Quake or Doom. There are so many things Goldeneye did that you praise:

 

1. Goldeneye had an accessible theme. People loved James Bond. Cyborgs and demons, not so much.

2. You could play it with friends on the couch together, not alone on your modem or at a dorky LAN party.

3. People were buying N64s just for Goldeneye (But not in the numbers of 2D Mario!!! Yeah, and they weren’t buying Voodoo cards by the million to play System Shock 2, either.)

4. It took a genre that only computer nerds had been interested in and brought it to millions of people.

5. The controls were bad by hardcore standards, but “good enough” and fairly straightforward by comparison with hardcore PC games.

6. It ran on a platform that required minimal fuss to operate, in an era where just getting Win9x to not crash was a Herculean feat. You just turned on the machine, and bam, you were shooting your buddies in the face.

 

I was playing mostly the same games as you in that era, and I never cared for Goldeneye. The funny thing is that reading what you wrote early on is why I began to think differently and realize that just because I loved Doom and didn’t like console games didn’t mean that somehow those were “fake” games that didn’t matter or whatever. And there’s nothing wrong with accepting you have niche taste, and not every game that you love is an “entertainment phenomenon,” to use your phrase. I don’t hesitate to admit that games like Quake, Unreal, and Doom would not have sold eight million units under any alternative set of circumstances, and that there are plenty of market-based, consumer-driven reasons Goldeneye did.  So it’s strange to see you tenaciously holding onto this idea that the niche games that hardly anyone bought are the direction gaming should go (such as you buying into the Internet wisdom that System Shock 2 matters), and the games that sold five, ten, or fifteen million units should be ignored because they trod on the territory of some PC game you loved.

 

When it comes to PC games, you exhibit the attitude of the hardcore you so despise (I play the REAL games, you just play stupid casual non-games) as the way of negating the influence of massively popular games as somehow irrelevant. But there’s a very good reason John Carmack is fading into irrelevance. His ideas had mere niche appeal.

I figured I would get these type of emails.

Let’s ask a great question: if a video games ages poorly, was the video game ever good in the first place?

I think it is a fantastic question and worthy of debate. The older I get, the more I think the question is yes. Pac-Man is still very fun today. Danial Crane’s Ghostbusters is not despite being popular at the time. I think the original Street Fighter 2 is still fun. But the pre-Street Fighter 2 fighting games? Yuck!

The value of games outside of the video game medium follow timeliness as to their value. We still play Chess and Checkers and Go. Shouldn’t the value of video games be given to their non-aging? If a game is good, then it shouldn’t age. Graphics age. Production effects age. But not the game.