Eric Ravenscraft
If you played Goldeneye 007 on the N64 as a kid with your friends, you know this horrible guy. Playing as Oddjob in multiplayer was basically cheating, and now the devs have confirmed it.
Back in the late 90s, playing games online against other people was still relatively rare and largely limited to PC gamers. So, if you were a console gamer and wanted to shoot your friends to death over and over, you were better off bringing them over to your house and playing Goldeneye. The game’s multiplayer mode that let you choose your character, your weapons, and a map to play on. The feature almost didn’t exist, being put together as a late addition in the development cycle, mere months before the game was scheduled to come out.
So, it shouldn’t be surprising that the game’s multiplayer wasn’t very well balanced. To wit: you could get a huge advantage by playing as Oddjob. The character is substantially shorter than all of the others, and with early console stick controls, it was difficult bordering on impossible to get a decent headshot on the guy. Naturally, picking Oddjob gave you a much higher chance of surviving. That’s not just your angry childhood friend screaming at you, that’s from the developers themselves:
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
There you have it. Playing Oddjob gives you an unfair advantage and if you pick him you’re basically cheating, Dustin. Glad we finally settled that.
Source: Mel Magazine
