The Nintendo 64 could have four controllers without having to bother with extra hardware. This immediately set it apart from the other consoles of its day (and before). So what if it still used cartridges, if the engine was 3D only, and if the graphics were fuzzy. It was 4-Player, dammit, so it was THE party machine.
But what game to play? Teenagers can only play so much Mario Kart before the childishness of the game wears down the competitive value. Lesser-known titles were, well, lesser-known, and produced at low quality. We needed a game with guns, explosions, and, if possible, geeky computer programmers named Boris. We needed Goldeneye.
Goldeneye was commercialized extensively on Channel One News, an incredibly weak TV show shown in our high school from 7th to 10th grade. The game was shown to have explosions, guns, excellent graphics and of course four players. Not that it needed this sort of press: everyone who owned an N64 was automatically assumed to already have Goldeneye.
The game had fuzzy graphics, the weapons did way too little damage, and there were pitiful few options provided for customizing game modes. But still the game kicked ass.
The first thing that the game immediately had going for it was that it was based on the kickass movie of the same name (duh). It was the first Bond movie in about a billion years (well, in my time anyway, and it's the same thing), it featured modern special effects, a new Bond who wasn't nearly as annoying as the other post-Sean Bonds, a tank chase, Boris, some great lines (no doubt made better by their being repeated by us playing the game), and best of all Sean Bean (who is the man).
The guns in this game were also great (well, they sure seemed awesome at the time). Grenade and rocket launchers dominated, but KF7 Soviets, proximity and remote mines, and the RC-P90 all occupied their own niches.
The characters in the game rocked. They took the awesome characters from the movie and made some pretty decent-looking game characters out of them. Even if this did result in the occasional scuffle over Trevelyan between two people who had never played before (I'm sure this was a nationwide problem at one point, and if I remember right a bill was introduced to Congress to deal with the issue), the characters were enough in number and variety to fit four unique players around the machine.
After a few years of reigning as king, Goldeneye stepped down to a worthy successor. Rare had released a sort-of-sequel to it called Perfect Dark, which improved on all sorts of things like graphics, guns, options (lots and lots of them!), and bots. However, Goldeneye will still be fondly remembered as the master of its time and one of the great video games ever.