GoldenEye is a first-person shooter released for the N64 back in the 90s. You might notice a keyword in that previous sentence. “Shooter.” This means the player is equipped with various guns and then shoots them at enemies. But is it possible to beat this classic shooter without actually shooting? No. But you can beat it by only firing one bullet.
Ryan White, better known as Goose in the speedrunning community, is a popular YouTuber, streamer and GoldenEye speedrunner. He has set multiple records on many different levels. So, after seeing many other YouTubers trying to play games without shooting, killing or jumping, Goose decided to try beating GoldenEye on N64 without shooting. He recently created and uploaded a video detailing how he attempted this and what issues he encountered.
When he first started playing the game without shooting, Ryan almost instantly ran into a major problem. On the famous first level of the game, Dam, players have to shoot a lock to open a gate. Despite knowing various tricks and techniques, Ryan was unable to bypass this obstacle. So he had to fire one bullet to break the lock, pass through the gate and finish the level.
However, beyond this one roadblock right at the start, Ryan was able to beat every other level in the game without shooting. Sometimes he would have to play around with guards until they pulled out a grenade, then rush over to them and kill them before they could use that grenade. Doing this would award Ryan with the unused grenade, which could be used to blow up door locks or other obstacles that are normally bypassed with bullets. Unfortunately, this particular trick doesn’t work on Dam because enemies won’t pull out grenades on that level.
Other levels were far less tricky and Ryan was able to quickly run by all the enemies and beat the level without needing to use any tricks or complex strategies.
I wonder what the developers of GoldenEye on N64 would think after seeing this video. Nobody developing GoldenEye at the time was probably thinking “Can you beat this game without shooting any bullets?” Yet, outside of one small issue, this is totally possible. I find these kinds of runs really impressive.