What comes to mind when you think of the first great multiplayer shooter? Call of Duty? Halo? Counter-Strike? Fantastic games to be sure, but for many, the champ always will be GoldenEye 007, the 1997 Nintendo 64 adaptation of the 1995 James Bond flick starring Pierce Brosnan. And here's your chance to enjoy a classic with a modern twist.
Beyond hosting a well designed and executed single-player campaign—one relatively faithful to the movie, too—GoldenEye 007 was significant for introducing multiplayer shooters to console gamers. Before GoldenEye, the options were slim. PC gaming wasn't nearly as popular as it is today (and the internet even less so), and the N64 was the first console with four controller ports. GoldenEye was among the first games to take advantage of them.
Still, time has not been kind to the first king of console split-screen. Aside from its rudimentary 3D graphics, the game's wonky single-stick control scheme is exceptionally difficult for anyone accustomed to the modern twin-stick system of games like Halo and Call of Duty. So how do players looking for an N64 nostalgia-hit get their fix?
Mods.
For nearly a decade, Half-Life 2 has provided a modding platform for myriad projects. GoldenEye: Source is a total-conversion mod that aims to rebuild the original GoldenEye 007 multiplayer in *Half-Life 2'*s Source engine. With the mod, players can once again experience everything from the tight, twisted corridors of "The Library" to the calamitous bullet-spray of the RC-P90—with updated graphics, a re-imagined soundtrack, and, of course, a modernized control scheme.
The project has been around for quite a while itself — the team originally began work in 2005, later launching out of the beta phase in 2009. Since then, it has continued to gain support, with more than a dozen professional and hobbyist game designers lending their efforts. And now, you can help too.
Last week, one of the project's managing directors — known by the handle "killermonkey" — announced that GoldenEye: Source was officially going open source. The current version (v 4.2.4) of the entire project's code base has been uploaded to GitHub, and is available for anyone — anyone with the know-how, at least — to download and assist working on.
The current goals of the project lie mainly in bug-fixing, as a multitude erupted from the transition to Source SDK 2013, the most recent version of Valve's Source engine and developer tools. Major revisions of code and feature additions are still being handled by the official GoldenEye: Source team, but modders interested in helping out can use GitHub's pull requests and issue tracker to assist with bug fixing and issue reporting.
