Back in my college days, Goldeneye was the number one game on the Nintendo 64. I can clearly remember late night, redbull-fueled, killer tournaments, and the fact that I was never the last man standing. One of my best friends played enough to memorize the maps and the respawn patterns of each so once he killed you the first time, he would meet you at your new place of generation to kill you over and over until the game ended… maybe it was fun for him but we all kinda just thought he was a jerk. Usually, you would be dead before picking up a new weapon, but your one hope for success was to escape long enough to grab a Golden Gun and manage a killshot as you bled out. The Golden Gun was THE elite weapon and a great equilizer–one shot was lethal and gave even a below average player a puncher’s chance against a champion.

In the Glock world, there have been countless companies who claim to have created the perfect trigger, and “perfected” one of the biggest perceived flaws of the “perfection” gun. While none of them likely transform the Glock into a Golden Gun, there definitely IS a golden trigger and it’s super rare to find. The above picture is one such example that comes from a very early gun. Not only is the golden metal from a short period where Glock used tinted sheet metal, it also happens to be from one of the few Gen 1 19 prototypes that were made.

The early days of Glock history were ones of constant change and the triggers were just one of the many parts that went through multiple variations. The geometry of the hump that acts to disengage the plunger safety seems to be the primary variation in design, but the color of the metal used in the stampings also varied. For a very short period, in between black and shades of silver, these gold colored transfer bars were standard production (they have only been observed thus far in guns from 1987 or 1988 though certainly not all guns from those two years).

The Glock forums are full of threads where a new collector will post pictures of his disappointment at having found his new Gen 1 came with an “aftermarket” trigger. The real tell tale is the shape of the hump interacting with the plunger safety–only a true early Glock has that shape though many new aftermarket kits have similar colors. But if your Glock originated during the late B-block through the early D-block, there’s a very good chance it was made with the gold transfer bar. While the geometry of the bar wasn’t changed, these obviously stand out due to the color.

Just for our progeny, let’s also post up an example of earlier trigger bars and the regular looking metal version of the same period as the golden guns: