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22nd Nov 2018

Family Guy did a spoof of GoldenEye on the N64 and it was absolutely spot-on

Wil Jones

So many wasted afternoons come flooding back

Seth MacFarlane loves a good cutaway.

Family Guy is known for a few things, but in particular it is infamous for the scenes where someone goes “This is like the time when…”, and it then cuts to a scene of Peter or whoever being in a film parody.

Oh, it’s The Shawshank Redemption, but with Peter Griffin. Oh, it’s Star Wars, but with Stewie. Oh, it’s the video for “Take On Me” but with Peter.

The joke is that it is a reference to a movie or show that you recognise, and that is funny because you recognise it.

Anyway, sometimes they do something actually clever. Like when Stewie replaced Jerry (of Tom & Jerry fame) dancing with Gene Kelly in a classic MGM musical.

Or like this scene, from the season 17 Family Guy episode “The Griffin Winter Games”, which aired this week in the US.

Peter and Meg had to escape a prison, and the show decided to depict in a lovingly recreated version of the Surface level from GoldenEye on the N64.

The first-person sequence riffed on the snowy level, complete with 1997-era blocky computer graphics.

They even did the intro bit with the secret files, that give you mission objectives, with tongue-in-cheek tasks like “Envoke video game nostalgia” and “Get controller all Cheese Doodle-y”.

It ends with a familiar little cutscene, of Meg and Peter climbing down into the bunker.

Family Guy has now been running for 17 seasons, and that makes us feel very, very old.

Goldeneye turned 21 this year and remains an absolute classic in the history of first-person shooters.

In October, the team that worked on the game admitted that playing as Oddjob in multiplayer deathmatches was cheating, due to his diminutive size – if only they had said that at the time, it would have prevented so many arguments in the late 1990s.

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