GoldenEye: The Quest to Re-Invent the Video Game Standard. By Meghan Flannery Case History The History of Computer Games March 15, 2002In my middle and early high school years, school social events were mostly dances, basketball games, and parties. By the time I was graduating from high school however, GoldenEye tournaments had become a standard all-school social event. The school would provide the televisions, and various students would donate the use of their Nintendo 64 systems, and a single elimination tournament would ensue until only the ultimate player was left standing. A video game had propelled itself and its genre of entertainment from the realms of social inadequacy into the social norm of teenage society. Suddenly everyone was playing the game, talking about the game, and integrating the language of the game into the teenage vernacular with a furry that conjured up images of Mario in 1989. Consequently, every console game released after GoldenEye was compared to it. What was it about this game that redefined the console game standard? scars ovies The success of GoldenEye as a video game was parallel to the success of its movie counterparts. Beginning with Dr. No in 1962, the James Bond films set the standard for action movies. The actors and actresses never won Ofor their performances in the series, and the films never won awards for special effects, and yet it became the most successful film series in movie history. The film series succeeded because it appealed to a wide variety of audiences, combined action with suspense, drama, and romance, and had a high entertainment value. The mwere also extremely well marketed. Similarly, GoldenEye set the standard for first-person shooter video games. At the time of its release, it was not the most technologically advanced video game on the market. Nonetheless, significant advances in console graphics, graphic realism, ease of playability, well-developed characters and storyline, and options within the game combined with good marketing to create a highly anticipated game with an overall package that was second to none. More importantly, GoldenEye appealed to every kind of gamer and attracted new people to the gaming world. Setting the Stage When Nintendo launched the N64 on September 29th, 1996, the video game industry wasn’t expecting much (Nintendo). The Sega Saturn had failed, and sales of the Sony Playstation were good, so critics did not expect consumers to purchase another more expensive console. However, the N64 sold 300,000 copies in three days, capturing 61% of the market, and making the N64 launch the most successful in console history (Lycos). There were two main factors that lead to the initial success of the system: the technological advances of the system and clever marketing.Nintendo turned to Silicon Graphics (SGI), who had arguably the best graphics capability at the time as seen in Jurassic Park and Terminator 2, for the design of the hardware (Nintendo). SGI in turn, used its Onyx workstations as models for the system. The N64 had some impressive numbers for its tiIt came before 3D acceleration was popular on the PC, a fact that makes the system seem even more impressive. Some of the specs include a 64-bit MIPS R4300 RISC CPU at 93.75 MHz, 64-bit RISC graphics co-processor at 62.5 MHz and 4 Mof DRAM at 500 MHz (Lycos). The N64 is also capable of calculating 160,000 rectangular polygons per second (Louderback, 134). Unlike the Onyx workstations however, the N64 had space limitations imposed by the use of cartridges. This means that textures are generally smaller than usual. Furthermore, the game then stretches the texture to make it larger in the game, creating the occasionally blurred image. Although these hardware components far surpassed the Sega Saturn released just prior to the N64, the Sony Playstation was capable of calculating 360,000 rectangular polygons per second and didn’t have the memory limitations of the cartridge (Lycos). Overall though, the N64 system had an impressive array of graphics and processing capabilities. me. B as ue Undoubtedly aware of its technical inferiorities, Nintendo seemed to believe that success could be found with a superior user interface. The N64 included important non-graphical upgrades to its predecessor the Super Nintendo System. It added two extra ports so that up to four people could play simultaneously on selected games. Nintendo also created many novel extras for the game. For example, the Rumble Pak was one of Nintendo's first add-ons. The Rumble Pak shook the controller whenever the player’s character was shot, hit, or ran into things (Nintendo). It added a dimension of realism to the game, making events on the screen both a tangible and visual experience. The newly designed controller walso an upgrade. The analog controller included a mini joystick that provided 360 degrees of movement, and six buttons to allow morecomplex actions and greater degrees of control for the player. Although the Sony Playstation demonstrated better graphics capability than the N64, Nintendo’s launch was more successful dto clever marketing. Released at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in 1996, the N64 was three months late to the US market (Lycos). However, Nintendo used those three months to inundate the consumer with advertising; Nintendo budgeted $100 million for the N64 campaign (Sheff, 244). The hype generated from the advertising for both the system and the Super Mario game that would be sold with it led to the phenomenon known as FUD. FUD stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and was a strategy employed by a company to prevent consumers from buying a competitors product before they get a chance to release their own (Littlejohn, 7). Simply put, Nintendo’s advertising campaign attempted to convince the consumer that theirproduct was worth waiting for, or at the very least, they should wait until all three consoles were available before making a decision. The extensive advertising and marketing strategy of including a highly anticipated game with the system boosted initial sales. However, the continued success of the system relied on the development of an exciting and desirable library of games. Sony had worked hard during the development of the Playstation to obtain as many licenses as possible for its games from such associations and movies as the NBA, NASCAR, NHL, Looney Toons, Batman, Spiderman, Tetris, and Top Gun (Playstation).
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