One of the greatest first-person shooters ever made was released exclusively on the Nintendo N64.
GoldenEye 007 was an innovative, tightly crafted shooter with single and multi-player modes. You played as then-James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan.
The game—developed by Rare—received widespread critical acclaim and became an instant hit with gamers, scoring a whopping 96/100 on Metacritic, selling over 8 million copies, and ultimately becoming the third best-selling N64 game of all time.
The 1997 game remains one of the most beloved shooters ever made, and was even remade by Activision years later for the Wii, DS, PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2010. The remake ditched Pierce Brosnan and used now-James Bond actor Daniel Craig’s likeness instead.
In 2000, Rare released Perfect Dark, also for the N64. Built on the same engine as GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark is considered one of the most technically advanced games for that system. Like its predecessor, Perfect Dark was a first-person shooter that received rave reviews—97/100 on Metacritc—and notoriety among gamers.
While it didn’t sell as well as GoldenEye 007, the game managed to cross the 3 million unit threshold worldwide, and is still considered one of the great shooters of all time. It even featured a female protagonist, Joanna Dark, something we see very rarely still especially in first-person shooter.
Of course, what may be Nintendo’s most famous shooter franchise is also helmed by a leading lady: Samus Aran, of Metroid fame.
Metroid Prime was easily one of the best GameCube games ever made, and one of the best first-person shooters to release on any system. The franchise—which took the old 2D Metroid gameplay and transformed it into a first-person perspective, while retaining many of the elements of exploration, puzzles, and platforming—began on GameCube and made its way to the Wii, though we haven’t seen a new entry on the Wii U.
Like Perfect Dark, Metroid Prime received a sky high 97/100 on Metacritic. The game, developed by Retro Studios, was one of the best-selling GameCube titles, and is widely acknowledged as one of the most unique and engaging first-person shooters ever made.
All of which leads me to this conclusion: Nintendo doesn’t release very many first-person shooters, but when they do they tend to be excellent. This is no surprise, really, given Nintendo’s standards for excellence in its first-party releases.
Some of the best-scoring games of the past two years, since the Wii U has been on the market, have been Nintendo IPs.
Super Mario World 3D scored 93/100. Mario Kart 8 received an 88/100 (and would have scored higher with a better Battle Mode.) Fire Emblem Awakening grabbed a 92/100, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worldsnabbed a 91/100. All of these games launched without bugs, received praise for their technical achievements, art styles, and so forth.
But Nintendo has not made or commissioned a new first-person shooter in years. Now that both Ubisoft and Activision are no longer bringing “mature” games to the Wii U, it’s time for Nintendo to step up to the plate.
Frankly, it’s no surprise that these publishers have largely abandoned the Wii U. As Paul Tassi notes, the target audience for Nintendo systems is largely family gamers and Nintendo enthusiasts. Many so-called core gamers that own a Wii U own it for the exclusives and play games like Call of Duty and Far Cry on other systems with more robust multiplayer communities.
But Nintendo can obviously publish top-notch first-person shooters, as evidenced by the three games mentioned above. In fact, Nintendo could easily continue to revolutionize the genre, especially if they made use of the Wii U gamepad.
As I noted earlier, I think saddling gamers with the gamepad was ultimately a mistake on Nintendo’s part. But now that we have it, we may as well get our money’s worth. The potential to do really interesting, creative things with the second screen is there. A new Metroid Prime could be a system seller.
Nintendo is in a tricky spot with the Wii U. Excellent first-party titles abound, and it easily has the best catalog of exclusive titles out of the three new-gen systems at this point. But the dwindling third-party support—and there was never much to begin with—means Nintendo needs to have as diverse an offering of genres and game styles as possible in-house.
Does the Wii U need Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s a huge draw for the system. But it does need first-person shooters.
And gamers would benefit from this as well. The first-person shooter genre has, to some degree, grown stagnant lately. Lots of games are being made, but few are pushing any real boundaries the way GoldenEye 007 did back in 1997.
Nintendo likes to experiment. Sure, they’ve released dozens of Mario games, but Mario himself defies genre, and the games range RPGs to kart racers to party games, from 2D side-scrollers to 3D platformers. There’s always something new, some little tweak, some attempt to keep the play fresh even while the characters remain largely unchanged.
That same tendency toward creative exploration needs to be applied to shooters.
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