dsheinem wrote:I feel like this was a false narrative that kids with N64s liked to tell themselves and still persists. PC FPS players by the time Goldeneye came out in late 1997 were only a few months away from Quake II and had already been flooded with FPS titles - many, many of them far better than Goldeneye in most every design element - for about 5 years at the point the N64 game hit.
Personally, I've never even owned a copy of the game, though others in college certainly did.
I was mostly playing stuff like Action Quake II at the time.
I don't mean to imply that it was head and shoulders better than PC games. However, it was released when the genre started to take a slightly more realistic turn. So where most prior console games were either simply ports of PC games or derivative of them,
Goldeneye was actually more forward-looking. When the genre was shifting from (or at least expanding on) things like
Quake II and
Unreal to
Half-Life,
Goldeneye was skewing a little more towards the latter, over a year earlier.