It’s official: anyone who played as Oddjob in the N64’s GoldenEye 007 was cheating.
If you’ve never played GoldenEye and are wondering what this has to do with Fortnite, allow us to provide some context. See, Oddjob was an incredibly short character you could pick in GoldenEye‘s multiplayer mode. While such things normally wouldn’t matter, the problem was that Oddjob’s height made him almost impossible to reliably target with the game’s auto-aim system (at certain distances). As such, players were forced to use the game’s notoriously wonky manual aim system just to get a bead on the character. This meant that picking Oddjob was a sure way to ruin a fine game of GoldenEye.
Don’t take our word for it. Karl Hilton, the lead environment artist for GoldenEye, and Mark Edmonds, gameplay programmer for GoldenEye, recently participated in an oral history of Goldeneye 007 for Mel Magazine and confirmed that picking Oddjob was a downright dirty move typical of the cheaters who did it.
“We all thought it was kind of cheating when we were play-testing with Oddjob, but it was too much fun to take out and there was no impetus from any of us to change it,” said Hilton. “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.”
Hilton may offer words of comfort to those who destroyed friendships as well as the sanctity of GoldenEye 007 matches by picking Oddjob, but Edmonds offers a more definitive stance on the well-known relationship between Oddjob and dirty cheaters.
“It’s definitely cheating to play as Oddjob!” said Edmonds. “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.”
Edmonds goes on to say that he actually likes how characters like Oddjob in GoldenEye encouraged people to make their own rules for the game rather than just play it as the developers intended. We say that he might be covering up slightly for the fact that GoldenEye‘s multiplayer mode was notoriously made in a very short amount of time, and that the Oddjob fiasco likely made it past testing.