What if: GoldenEye 007 had been designed for PC?

There’s a beautiful, industry-shaping moment less than a minute into the opening “Dam” mission of GoldenEye 007, in which you ascend a watchtower and find a sniper rifle. It’s instantly clear what you’re meant to do: grab the sniper, zoom in on some bad guys, and shoot them in the face.

Please understand, in 1997 the term ‘FPS’ carried certain expectations like… labyrinthine levels, coloured keys, and mindless monsters. Then along comes Rare with a licensed Nintendo 64 FPS, which throws every pillar of shooter design out the window, save for the exploding barrels. Its levels feature a healthy balance of stealthy sequences and murder marathons, and the environments include a range of challenging side objectives. More importantly, every enemy you face has a brain: they’ll guard and patrol areas, flinch based on where you shoot them – no one expected the Donkey Kong Country studio to invent the crotch shot – and take cover when in combat. And if you don’t make a sound or get spotted, they’ll carry on with their business.

All of this technological and level design advancement, and yet Bond can’t jump. Isn’t that weird? Sure, the original Doom Guy can’t jump either, but most FPS game protagonists that came after him could leap like salmon. To be fair, squeezing a dedicated jump button onto the N64’s unique controller would have been no mean feat. But what if history had taken a different course and Rare had instead developed GoldenEye for PC? Could the humble spacebar have resulted in a bunny-hopping Bond? And if so, what else might have changed beyond the foul fuzz of 240p?

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