This Day In Gaming History: August 25th, 1997 – FPS games are changed forever with GoldenEye 007

While first-person shooter games had already been established in the market by 1997, with Doom and Wolfenstein 3D establishing the genre’s presence on PC. Quake, which arrived in 1996, further established the genre – but the first big one that established FPS games on home consoles came from an unlikely source – one of the biggest blockbuster movies of 1995.

Generally speaking, games based off of movies aren’t all that great – but Goldeneye 007 wasn’t your typical first person shooter. Taking many of the conventional aspects of FPS games and running with them, it eventually became one of the highest-selling N64 games of all time – and demonstrated the viability of the genre on consoles.

There’s plenty of other things the game did well, to be sure. One of them includes stealth missions, where unlike Duke Nukem games, alerting enemies to your presence would often result in swarms of them trying to find you. You could even use a sniper rifle to pick off enemies from a distance, which was somewhat of a novelty at the time.

A key influence on many shooters that came after (especially Halo), GoldenEye proved developers could make FPS games work on a home console. Plus, look how much fun it still is!