I was never good at losing. Not as an adult and certainly not as a child. Every report card, every little league at bat, every casual game of Monopoly was a referendum as on my worth as a person. Victory was validation. Defeat was unacceptable.
Enter GoldenEye. I didn’t grow up in a Ninendo household — in fact, I wasn’t allowed any video games, period, until high school. Naturally, every visit to a friend’s house was a chance to indulge in the forbidden fruit of Mario Kart 64 or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. GoldenEye, with its first-person violence and awkward, childish attempts at replicating the suave sexuality of the Bond series, was a particularly sweet prize. It was, to my preteen self, everything that was so enticingly exotic and risqué about gaming.
Trouble is, I sucked at it. Hours of watching friends play through the single-player missions didn’t prepare me for wrangling the N64 controller — closer to a work of avant-garde sculpture than anything designed for the human hand — or mastering even basic controls. Every multiplayer match was a massacre, a Sisyphean struggle to get off just one accurate shot before being cruelly cut down by my infinitely more skilled friends.
Winning just one round of GoldenEye multiplayer became an obsession. I would demand rematches long after my friends had tired of the game, sneak looks at other player’s screens, hide in corners until other players were weak and then pounce on them when the odds were most lopsided. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I even used Oddjob. All’s fair in love and war, except using Oddjob.
I was, in short, a noob. Not that it helped — even at my most unsportsmanlike, I invariably finished no more than a few rungs from the bottom. My childhood belief that there was nothing I could not master as long as I set my mind to it or cheated was quickly running up against the cruel reality that no one can be good at everything.
It’s a vital lesson, if a hard one to learn. No matter how many times your mom tells you you’re special, you’re going to eventually find something you’re terrible at no matter how hard you try.
For me, that something was GoldenEye. It broke me. It made me accept that sometimes you lose and sometimes you win and that’s just the way of the world. And, eventually, I learned to enjoy GoldenEye, to find the fun in getting repeatedly shot and killed by my friends.
My first step toward maturity was spurred by a 64-bit game adaptation of a movie about an English sociopath saving the world from another English sociopath who wants to use a space laser to rob a bank. Inspiration comes from the most unexpected places.
I’m bad at Goldeneye. And that’s okay.
