GoldenEye 007: the beloved classic that reshaped video games

The N64 shooter was one of the most innovative games in history - and the myths around its creation still intrigue

Life moves pretty slow on a video game magazine when the last pages are being sent to the printer. As a writer on Edge, I'd have to be available in the office to write captions and headlines, but often we were there long into the night as the art team designed pages. So the writers and subs would have nothing to do but wait and play games. And for many months, the game we played was GoldenEye.

Released two years after the film, into a market where tie-ins were never exactly epoch-making products, it's fair to say expectations were low for the N64 shooter. But this was a shooter by Rare, the veteran Midlands-based developer of Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct, and the game that would introduce a lot of players to the concept of using an analogue stick to look around in a 3D game - it's difficult to overstate how important that was.