‘GoldenEye 007’ makes unexpected, illegal return to gaming

opinion

My college years were a great time for gaming. The mid- to late-90s brought the birth of the PlayStation, and it along with the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 marked the arrival of 3D gaming to the masses.

While nowhere near as advanced as today’s systems, the Nintendo 64 in particular was the perfect system for me at the time. It allowed you to plug in four controllers at a time when most systems limited you to just two. In the dorm rooms of Ball State University, my friends and I would play countless matches of “WCW/nWo Revenge” and “GoldenEye 007.”

“GoldenEye 007” in particular is looked back on as a landmark title in video game history. While not the first first-person shooter released on a home console, it is often credited as the first game to get the genre right on a home console. 

“GoldenEye 007” actually has been in the news a lot this year for an almost 25-year-old title. A full playthrough video of a previously unannounced remaster of the game that had been in development for the Xbox 360 and almost completed was posted to YouTube last month.

The N64 game was originally developed by the British studio Rare, which in 1997 was partly owned by Nintendo. In 2002, the studio was purchased entirely by Microsoft and began making games exclusively for the Xbox platforms.

Around late 2006/early 2007, a team at Rare started developing a remaster of “GoldenEye 007” for the Xbox 360 without getting approval from Microsoft to do so. Ross Bury and Mark Edmonds, who worked on the remaster at Rare, spoke with Ars Technica recently and said the team was eventually given the go-ahead to continue development on the game after receiving approvals from EON, which owns the James Bond character, and Nintendo, whicpublished the original game.

Unfortunately, not everyone at Nintendo had approved the project. When development of the game was mostly complete and the team was doing the final bug fixes, it was informed that title had been canceled.

That was the end of the game’s story until gameplay of the near-finished build of the game leaked on YouTube. Soon after that happened, the files for the game were leaked online and the game is playable through the Xbox 360 emulator Xenia. Doing so is technically illegal, so do so at your own risk.

Now that the remaster is kind of out in the wild, it would be great if Microsoft, Nintendo and EON could get together and work out the rights to get the game officially released. There’s definitely a better chance of that happening now than 15 years ago, as Microsoft and Nintendo actually collaborate quite a bit nowadays with several Xbox games released on the Switch and “Minecraft” characters added to “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.”

If a remastered version of “GoldenEye 007” is released on the Switch with updated graphics and controls, that would be an easy purchase for me.

Dusty Ricketts can be reached at dricketts@thedestinlog.com. He is currently playing “Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury” and “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.” You can find him to play online through his PlayStation Network ID: DustRAG316.

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