author: Adrian Piotrowski
Canceled Remaster of Goldeneye Available Online
13 years ago, Microsoft canceled the release of a remastered edition of the iconic Bond game GoldenEye. This week, inquisitive internet users found a file with the nearly completed version of the game.
IN A NUTSHELL:
- An unreleased remaster of 2008's GoldenEye for Xbox 360 surfaced on the Internet;
- The original release failed to materialize due to a multitude of licensing rights.
GoldenEye 007 is considered to be one of the best games released for Nintendo 64, so it's no wonder that after Microsoft bought out Rare (the game's devs), the company wanted to develop a modernized version of the most famous game about agent 007. Unfortunately, the planned 2008 release of the remaster, which was supposed to launch on Xbox Live Arcade, failed to materialize. Over the next few years, screenshots made rounds on the Internet, confirming the fact that work on the game was at an advanced level. A few days ago, YouTuber Graslu00 uploaded a longplay from the remake, which only confirmed the legends that had been circulating for years that an XBLA version of GoldenEye 007 was very close to release. The developer stressed that he had received the game file from an anonymous source, along with a recommendation that he wait for a specific date to reveal it. The donor also left the following message:
"Never say never, release coming soon, James."
The gameplay was uploaded on January 29. 5 days later, journalists from Ars Technica found a file with an almost finished game, which, as it turned out, was made available on a website not protected by any password. A folder named Bean was found there, which was the working title of the remaster at the time. The file was dated August 24, 2007. It turned out that the game in the folder can be run - without any problems - in the Xenia emulator. And apart from a few minor problems, the title ran smoothly in 60 fps, even on a 4K monitor. The file can now be found very easily on the Internet.
What, then, stood in the way of a virtually completed game seeing the light of day? The answer came a few days earlier from Grant Kirkhope, the former composer at Rare who worked on both the original GoldenEye 007 and the remaster. In an interview for Video Games Chronicle, he admitted that the problem turned out to be the numerous licensing rights.
"(...)There were too many stakeholders. Microsoft, Nintendo, and EON [owners of the Bond license] could never agree on terms, and that’s before you even start to consider getting all the original movie actors to agree to have their likenesses used again. It would’ve cost a lot of money to get it done and because of that the project probably wouldn’t have been financially viable."
Kirkhope's version fits what current Xbox brand chief Phil Spencer said about the game in 2015. He wrote on Twitter that the copyrights associated with GoldenEye 007 are complicated due to the number of different companies that would need to be dealt with. It was for this reason that the company scrapped the project.
GoldenEye 007 finally got the remaster it wanted, but it was made by a studio called Eurocom. In 2010 the Nintendo Wii and DS version were released. A year later an improved edition, titled Reloaded, appeared on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was confirmed that all changes made in these titles were reflected in the game Microsoft developed a few years earlier.
