The Computing History Museum based in the UK has put together a roughly $8,000 rig that allows you to play GoldenEye 007 for the Nintendo 64 on four separate screens, putting an end to screen-cheating once and for all. This was put together to celebrate the 25th anniversary of GoldenEye on the N64.
While the rig might be pricey, the way it works is actually pretty straightforward and even uses the N64’s original hardware. The original image is simply broken up and split across four TVs, with player one able to go into a full screen to select the mode they’d like to play. Each controller will control its respective TV and, in doing so, eliminate screen cheating.
Screen cheating is a term often used when playing split-screen multiplayer, and is meant to call out someone whenever they look at your side of the screen to an advantage over you.
While many games have had their fair share of screen cheaters, none have earned quite the same reputation for them as GoldenEye. Thank to the game’s difficult controls, you could almost always count on whoever you were playing against to be watching your screen to try to kill you. The game even has a playable character named Oddjob, that’s notoriously hard to hit due to his height. Even though the game is filled with flaws, it’s undeniably a part of its charm.
Screen cheating became a staple of GoldenEye’s multiplayer, and there was nothing you could do to stop it. But thanks to the Computing History Museum, GoldenEye multiplayer can be played in an entirely new–and fair–way. If you’re in the UK, you can buy tickets to an exhibit where you play the game yourself, as well as a playable Xbox 360 version of GoldenEye that was canceled.
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