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Gaming

24th Aug 2018

Playing as Oddjob in GoldenEye on the N64 is officially cheating, say the game’s creators

Wil Jones

GoldenEye 007 on the N64 was the greatest console shooter of all time

No, seriously, you can keep you Overwatch, Your Fortnite. All your CoDs. Your Halo. GoldenEye was the GOAT, and always will be the GOAT.

Based on the Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie of the same name, the N64 game had a brilliant single player mode that followed the plot of the movie pretty closely.

But we all know it was the four-player deathmatch multiplayer that made it a masterpiece. So many hours spent focusing on your quarter of the screen, stalking your friends through the upper levels of the Stack, or hiding out in the toilets of the Facility.

If you got really into it, you even got as serious as putting on one hit kills, or only having the Golden Gun. Sometimes, there was even the madness of playing ‘slappers only’, with no weapons at all, trying to karate chop each other to death.

There was always one person who would ruin it though. Someone who would pick Oddjob. As well as the cast of GoldenEye, the game featured many other classic Bond villains – including the tough as nails bodyguard from Goldfinger, played by Japanese-American wrestler Harold Sakata.

Despite Sakata being 5ft 10 IRL, in the game, he was inexplicably half the size of all the other characters. Meaning that it gave anyone who played as him a completely unfair advantage. Being Oddjob was always banned by experienced players of the game.

Now the creators of the game themselves have confirmed that yes, playing with Oddjob is definitely cheating. Finally, justice!

In an oral history of the game on Mel Magazine, gameplay programmer Mark Edmonds admitted that picking Oddjob was unfair.

“It’s definitely cheating to play as Oddjob!” said Edmonds “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.”

“We could have put something in to stop this blatant cheating, but why not just let players decide on their own rules?”

Don’t you realise how many arguments you called in the late 1990s, Mark?