A playable version of that beautiful Xbox 360 GoldenEye 007 remaster we reported over the weekend is spreading quickly online after Ars Technica spilled the beans last night. I played and, unsurprisingly, it’s really great.
The files come from an almost final beta version of an Xbox Live Arcade release that was canceled sometime in the late afternoon. Grant Kirkhope, who composed the music for the original GoldenEye and was still at Rare during the remasteringdevelopment of said VGC last week, the project never went public due to the large number of licensors who would have to sign the project before it could see the light of day.
“[T]there were many interested parties, ”explained Kirkhope. “Microsoft, Nintendo and [James Bond license owners] EON could never agree to the terms, and that’s before you even started to consider getting all the actors in the original film to agree to have their images used again. It would have cost a lot of money to do so, and because of that, the project probably would not have been financially viable. “
GoldenEye 007, which was released on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, was considered the gold standard for first-person shooter games for the console during its time, and is still viewed with affection as a classic today. When asked about this remastered canned in 2015, the current executive vice president of Microsoft games, Phil Spencer reiterated that the rights of the game were very difficult to guarantee for a remastering.
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The hollow GoldenEye 007 build works surprisingly well on the Xbox 360 Xenia emulator, with just a few hiccups here and there while the game loads assets. There’s even an interesting feature where pressing the right button toggles between the updated textures and the original graphics of the Nintendo 64. It’s very similar to the original, only with better controls and visuals.
While we cannot link the files in question for obvious reasons, they shouldn’t be too hard to find for anyone with a gram or two of Google-fu.