Why is oddjob cheating

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 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. The classic is still held in high regard by many gamers, though it's known for some quirks that wouldn't necessarily fly in modern gaming. One of those quirks is the controversial character Oddjob, whose short stature made him significantly harder to shoot compared to other characters players could select in GoldenEye 's multiplayer mode. Oddjob is considered so cheap that some consider picking him a form of cheating, a claim that one of the game's developers has now weighed in on.

In an interview with Mel Magazine , GoldenEye gameplay and engine programmer Mark Edmonds confirmed that playing as Oddjob in multiplayer is "definitely cheating. Since GoldenEye only has local multiplayer, this makes sense, as players are free to play the game with their friends however they want.

Email Email. Comment Comment. Friends don't let friends choose Oddjob. Products In This Article. GoldenEye Platform:. Popular Content. View source. History Talk 3. Multiplayer Oddjob is the 11th character in the roster. He is the shortest character in the game, despite Oddjob as he appeared in the original film being about average height.

It seems likely that he was confused with the actually diminutive Nick Nack from The Man with the Golden Gun , though possible he was deliberately made short to balance the option of a very tall player Jaws with a very short player. He has the shortest line of sight. His character model seems to be based on the actor who played him, Harold Sakata.