The Xbox Live Arcade remastering canceled by Rare from its seminal sniper for the N64 GoldenEye 007 was revealed in its entirety with a two-hour video.
The video below, published on the YouTube channel of content creator GoldenEye 007 Graslu00 (via GoldenEye Dossier), shows the complete game played on the difficulty OO Agent in 4k resolution and 60 frames per second, with 30 minutes of multiplayer at the end. The footage shows GoldenEye 007 XBLA running on an emulator to achieve the highest resolution.
In 2007, Microsoft-owned Rare developed an HD remaster of its classic N64 to be launched on the XBLA, but copyright disputes saw the project closed. Prior to this video, only 30 minutes of footage of the game had been released. We now see the game in all its glory – from the iconic Dam opening level to the final Egyptian bonus level – all with an acceptable frame rate!
On a tweet, Graslu00 insisted that the gameplay is not related to any recent leaks. Instead, the game’s builds were obtained years ago on PartnerNet, a sandbox version of Xbox Live available only to development kit owners. According to Graslu00, a version of the game will be released in 2021.
Although the XBLA remaster never saw the light of day, we ended up getting a complete remake on the Wii with the GoldenEye 007 with the same name in 2010. This version, developed by Eurocom and published by Activision, later received an HD port on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as GoldenEye 007: Reloaded in 2011.