It’s been nearly 20 years since GoldenEye 007 was released for the Nintendo 64, splitting the CRT televisions of millions of households into four slugfest quadrants. For gamers of a certain generation, GoldenEye was a touchstone and perhaps the high-water mark of living room shooters in the days where online multiplayer on a console was largely out of the question. That’s probably why the game’s been remade so many times before, whether in fan projects like GoldenEye: Source or 2010’s official remake.
Still, that was five years ago, and if the current Star Wars film bulldozing the box office is any indication, the nostalgia well is not drying up any time soon. So here’s another GoldenEye update, this time in a proof of concept of the game’s Facility level created in in Unreal Engine 4 by game artist and university student Jude Wilson. It’s an attractive piece of work, and one that hews much more closely to the feel of the level in the original game than the palette of dark green, gray, and blue of same level in the 2010 redo.
The strangest thing about nostalgia—and video games in particular—is that the mind never remembers the graphics as crude and blocky as they were, so looking at Wilson’s work elicits more of a “Oh yes, that’s what GoldenEye looks like” rather than a “Wow, modern graphics!” That’s a compliment to the designer. The mind certainly does not remember Sean Bean’s likeness looking like a Circus Peanut.
[via Games Radar]