Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 is hands down one of the best video games of all-time...or so says our nostalgia. I spent hours and hours of my life playing this game both the single player but mainly the multiplayer with my friends. The best part, I never even owned a Nintendo 64, but I knew which friends did and lets just say those were my compadres during this period of time.
If you're anything like me and my crew, hours were spent running the halls of "The Facility" and the other maps in the game and rightfully so, almost as many hours were spent arguing about who got to be the character "Oddjob" or whether or not he was allowed to play.
If you're not familiar with the game, Oddjob was a character that was about 3/4 the height of the other options and when you kneeled, he was essentially half size. The game featured an auto aim feature that when aimed at Oddjob would auto-aim to the location where a normal characters head would be...but he was so short the shot would go right over and your aiming mechanism would go wacky...all while that friend is knocking you out of the game.
Well, we finally have a definitive answer when it comes to Oddjob in the game thanks to the very people that created the game.
Recently, MEL Magazine filed a story all about Goldeneye 007 and got a chance to sit down with some of the main developers who had an interesting opinion on Oddjob.
"We all thought it was kind of cheating when we were play-testing with Oddjob [due to his short stature, the auto-aim of the weapons goes above his head], but it was too much fun to take out and there was no impetus from any of us to change it. It’s clearly become part of the culture and folklore of the game — I noticed playing GoldenEye as Oddjob was mentioned in Ready Player One, so ultimately, I think it’s fine."
"It’s definitely cheating to play as Oddjob! 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. Personally I like to pick Jaws [who originally appeared in 1977’s The Spy Who Loved Me] and then beat the person with Oddjob just to show them! We could have put something in to stop this blatant cheating, but why not just let players decide on their own rules?"
"Oddjob is cheating: He is banned. That said, I have only played with a caliber of people who would never consider choosing him, so it has never been an issue."
So there you have it, if you used Oddjob back in the day while playing Goldeneye you were cheating!