20 Incredibly Important Video Games That Shaped The Industry

13. Goldeneye 007

Why It Is Important: Goldeneye popularised the FPS on consoles with its highly customisable multi-player mode. While it may not hold up well today (seriously, moving around feels like controlling a drunk guy that's on the end of a very large, bendy stick), Goldeneye had groups of friends worldwide huddling round a bulky CRT televisions and playing until their fingers bled. Until Goldeneye's release, shooters were mostly seen on the PC. Though there had been shooters on consoles before its release in 1997 (Hexen, Doom, Turok etc), Goldeneye really pushed the genre forward with its innovative multiplayer mode that players could tweak and customise. On top of having five main modes to choose from players could pick weapon sets for each match. Will you play with pistols, or will you opt for no weapons and run around slapping each other silly instead? The choice was yours. Its single-player by comparison was just as innovative and had emphasis on realism and physics, which was practically unheard of in the era of Doom clones. Enemies had context-sensitive animations, meaning that if you shot them in the leg, they'd actually react to it realistically with blood stains appearing where the bullet entered their body. Though the PC shooter Team Fortress added a similar feature in a patch that pre-dates Goldeneye by a few months, it's Rare's game that made it a requirement for all shooters that followed. Goldeneye is a landmark title that started the unstoppable rise of the shooter that would eventually become the massively popular genre we know it as today.