A playable version of the beautiful Xbox 360 GoldenEye 007 remaster we reported this weekend spread quickly online to Ars Technica spilled the beans last night. I played it and, surprisingly, it’s great.
The files come from an almost final beta version of an Xbox Live Arcade version that was finally canceled sometime in the late evening. Grant Kirkhope, who composed music for the original Golden Eye and was still Rare during the remasterdevelopment, tell VGC last week the project was never made public due to the overwhelming number of licensors who had to sign off on the project before it saw the light of day.
‘[T]there were too many stakeholders here, ”Kirkhope explained. Microsoft, Nintendo and [James Bond license owners] EON could never agree on the terms, and that is even before you consider having all the original actors agree to use their equals again. It would have cost a lot of money to get it done, and therefore the project would probably not be financially viable. ”
GoldenEye 007, first introduced on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, was considered the gold standard for first-person shooters at the time, and is still lovingly considered a classic today. When asked about this canned remaster in 2015, Microsoft’s current executive vice president of the game Phil Spencer repeat that the rights at stake were just too challenging to secure for a remaster.
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The leak GoldenEye 007 build runs surprisingly well on the Xbox 360 emulator Xenia, with just a few parentheses here and there while the game loads assets. There’s even a neat feature where the pressure on the right shoulder button alternates between the upgraded textures and the original Nintendo 64 graphics. It is very close to the original, only with better controls and footage.
While we can’t link to the files in question for obvious reasons, it should not be too difficult to find for someone with a grain or two of Google fu.