One of the most popular first-person shooter games of all time, and the game that really got the ball rolling when it comes to first-person shooters being on home consoles, is Rare's Goldeneye 007 for the N64. The game is a timeless classic, even if it hasn't aged quite as well as some gamers may have hoped for. Even still, one thing remains ever present today as it did back in the day: Oddjob is a cheat. The recognition of Oddjob being a cheat in Goldeneye 007 isn't just limited to the community, it's something the developers themselves recognized from the N64 first-person shooter, and finally admitted to all these years later.
In a retrospective over on MelMagazine.com, some of the former developers who worked on the game talked about the design aspects of Goldeneye, even touching on the Oddjob controversy. Lead environment artist, Karl Hilton, explained...
We all thought it was kind of cheating when we were play-testing with Oddjob, but it was too much fun to take out and there was no impetus from any of us to change it. It's clearly become part of the culture and folklore of the game -- I noticed playing GoldenEye as Oddjob was mentioned in Ready Player One, so ultimately, I think it's fine.
That's kind of a hallmark achievement... that a broken aspect of the game makes its way into a mainstream Hollywood film like Ready Player One? Well done.Although, it just mean James Halliday was a cheater.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with why the character is considered cheating, it's because Oddjob's model is diminutive in its design, and so he's unable to be targeted by other players using the auto-aim feature in the game since the auto-aim was designed at a fixed height based on the other normal-sized character models in the game.
Goldeneye 007 was one of the early 3D first-person shooters on the market and at the time dual-analog controls were not quite common, so most people were used to the vertical auto-aiming that was featured in games like Duke Nukem 3D and DOOM, which is a feature that carried over into Rare's shooter. However, in Goldeneye 64, since the auto-aim didn't deliberately adjust to Oddjob's lowered height, what would end up happening is that opposing players would auto-aim at Oddjob and always miss since the reticle's auto-adjust would hover just above his head instead of at his head. This meant that in order to shoot him, players would have to use the manual aim feature to target him and shoot at him, which meant stopping and taking aim.
This was an unfair advantage to anyone who played as Oddjob because they could continue to run around and shoot at players, while others would have to stop and aim at him.
Mark Edmonds, the gameplay and engine programmer for Goldeneye 64, commented that it definitely is cheating, but also part of the game's culture at this point...
It's definitely cheating to play as Oddjob! But that can just add to the fun when you're all sitting there next to each other and berating/poking/hitting the person who chooses him.
It's nice to know that the developers can have a laugh at this point. Rare is probably glad Goldeneye 007 wasn't released in recent times where eSports is the big thing because the character most certainly would be banned from competition and would likely cause all sorts of media controversy. However, given that the game is more than 20 years old, everyone can sit back and have a laugh at this point.
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