Few childhood memories come back to me so easily as long summer sleepovers that involved good friends staying up until all hours of the night playing GoldenEye 64. The Facility map was like a second home to us all and screen-looking was a grievous offense that could never actually be proved. It wasn’t just the fun with friends, or proving yourself by completing the 007 Agent difficulty level through the whole campaign; it was a part of childhood and the soundtrack created by Grant Kirkhope was as important to it as anything else. An uncompressed version of his soundtrack has made it’s way online, almost 20 years later, to present the music in all of its original glory. The uncompressed version of Kirkhope’s music finally adds a fuller sound to the bass and percussion that was impossible when it was on the Nintendo system.

Music and audio on the Nintendo 64 was not the greatest. This was the result of a design choice in the system that did away with a dedicated sound card, like Nintendo had used in their Super Nintendo System, and instead had to pull processor power away from the graphical capabilities toward audio. At a time where companies and consoles were in an arms race for better graphics, Nintendo 64 had to sacrifice the quality of a game’s audio to do this. Let’s face it, GoldenEye was known for it’s graphics and realistic animations. Right?

[Image: Imgur]

What do you think of the uncompressed version of GoldenEye’s soundtrack? Let us know in the comments below.

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Image: isozone

HT: boingboing