“No Oddjob.”
Update: This was originally written in August of 2022, on the 25th anniversary of Goldeneye. Now the game is returning to Nintendo Switch and Xbox Game Pass on January 27 — giving you a chance to brutally cheat with Oddjob.
Today is the 25th anniversary of Goldeneye on the N64 and it got us all talking about our favorite things about the game. Of course there are wonderful things like the iconic levels, the ramping difficulty that added more objectives, and multiplayer that warranted staying up all night.
Then there’s Oddjob — that bastard.
In what might have been one of the most broken elements in any multiplayer video game, developers Rare put Oddjob in game as a joke to start, but at some point they made it permanent. He was broken beyond all belief. Any group that played Goldeneye with regularity would have a firm “no Oddjob” rule — and rightfully so.
Just look at him. Oddjob is a full third smaller than James Bond and Baron Samedi, and he had a hit box to match. You simply could not win in a firefight head-to-head vs. Oddjob because he was so much smaller. The game’s generous auto-lock wouldn’t find Oddjob, and c-button aiming took too much time. If he was crouching, forget about it. Oddjob turned into a little lump crouchwalking around the map with no hopes of besting him.
This still isn’t the worst thing about the character. It was a glitch that Oddjob enabled that took him from just being broken, and turned him into a monster of unspeakable evil.
I thought everyone knew this about Oddjob, but after asking some friends they’d never heard about the crate glitch. See, if you destroyed a crate with Oddjob, then crouched where the crate was located, he was too small to block the spawning planes of the crate. This meant that after a few seconds the crate would reform around Oddjob, trapping him inside.
This might not seem like a big issue but consider a 1 vs. 1 scenario (which is how we’d play in Goldeneye) brackets. The Oddjob player would just have to get ahead on kills, blow up a crate, crouch inside it and look at the floor. The opponent would have no visual clue where Oddjob was, and it turned into a race to blow up every crate in the map to try and find him and kill him, before the time ran out.
It was so against the spirit of the game that it broke everything. The game was transformed into timed hide and seek. It was hell, and Oddjob made it all possible. There are so many examples of things being busted or unfair in video games, but nothing comes close to how much Oddjob broke everything. On this, the 25th anniversary of Goldeneye it made me think of how horrible that little guy was.
