21 years after GoldenEye N64 came out, it's official: playing as Oddjob WAS cheating

If you played GoldenEye back in the day with friends, you'll be familiar with the following phrase: "Oddjob is banned."

Oddjob, one of the many characters you could select when playing the competitive multiplayer portion of Rare's seminal Nintendo 64 first-person shooter, was often banned by players because he was short - short enough to break the game.

Oddjob was so short that GoldenEye's auto-aim would whizz by above his head, which made shooting him incredibly difficult as you'd have to stop moving to use the precise aim to manually aim downwards. That sounds like cheating, right? Well, there were plenty of Oddjob players - monsters, I'd like to call them - who'd argue the toss. Oddjob is in the game and so it's perfectly fair to play as him, they'd say, before nonchalantly picking Akuma in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

Now, 21 years after GoldenEye graced the N64, we finally have official word that yes, picking Oddjob WAS cheating - and the ruling has come from the developers themselves.

In an oral history of GoldenEye published on Mel Magazine, Karl Hilton, who was the lead environment artist on the game, and Mark Edmonds, who was the gameplay and engine programmer, put the long-running debate to bed: if you picked Oddjob you were a dirty cheat.

"We all thought it was kind of cheating when we were play-testing with Oddjob, but it was too much fun to take out and there was no impetus from any of us to change it," Hilton said.

"It's clearly become part of the culture and folklore of the game - I noticed playing GoldenEye as Oddjob was mentioned in Ready Player One, so ultimately, I think it's fine."

(It's not fine, Karl.)

"It's definitely cheating to play as Oddjob!" Edmonds stressed. "But that can just add to the fun when you're all sitting there next to each other and berating/poking/hitting the person who chooses him.

"Personally I like to pick Jaws and then beat the person with Oddjob just to show them! We could have put something in to stop this blatant cheating, but why not just let players decide on their own rules?"

So there you have it. No more arguments. No more fights. Playing as Oddjob is cheating, and therefore he is banned. Carry on!