GoldenEye 007 · Nintendo 64 · 1997 · Impact: Competitive
In GoldenEye 007's multiplayer, the short character Oddjob was so much harder to hit than the rest of the cast that "No Oddjob" became one of the most widely observed house rules in console gaming.
GoldenEye 007's split-screen multiplayer let players choose from a roster of characters from the Bond films, and nearly all of them were roughly the same height. Oddjob was not. Because the game's auto-aim and the players' own aim were tuned to standard-height opponents, shots that would hit anyone else often passed over Oddjob's head, while he could hit everyone else normally. No one at Rare had designed him as an advantage, but in a fast four-player match the difference was obvious, and players who picked him were accused of cheating. The response was social rather than technical: groups across the world adopted "No Oddjob" as a house rule, alongside other informal bans on particular weapons or characters. The episode is an early, widely shared example of players fixing an unintended balance problem with an agreed rule rather than waiting for a patch that, on a cartridge game in 1997, was never going to come.
Most of GoldenEye's multiplayer characters share a similar height, and players naturally learned to aim — and to rely on the game's assistance — at the head and chest height those characters share. Oddjob's model is noticeably shorter, so shots that would have connected with anyone else could pass harmlessly over him.
The advantage was not huge in every situation, but in the close-quarters chaos of a four-player match it was easy to notice and easy to resent, which is why it became the most famous balance complaint in the game.
With no patches and no official competitive scene, GoldenEye players governed the game themselves. "No Oddjob" sat alongside other common house rules — bans on particular weapons, or on screen-watching — that groups agreed on before a match began.
The pattern it illustrates has lasted: when a game cannot or will not be changed, players change the rules they play by, and competitive communities still adopt character and item bans to correct balance problems the developers never fixed.