The updated version of GoldenEye 007 was almost complete, but then, it didn’t see the daylight after all… but now, more than a decade later, a playthrough of it has surfaced on the Internet!

GoldenEye 007 is a defining classic. The Rare-developed title launched in the summer of 1997 on the Nintendo 64 – it was an FPS that required some stealth as well some good aim on the platform that still used cartridges, unlike its main competitor, the PS1, that used CDs. There was also four-player split-screen multiplayer in it, which is also why this trip of Bond has become a true classic after all these years.

There were plans for an Xbox Live Arcade remaster. (Xbox Live Arcade was in the Xbox 360 era – it was mostly smaller, mostly digital-only releases for several games, and the Microsoft-owned Rare’s title would have been published on this platform, too.) It was almost ready to be released, but in the end, the project did not happen. Its story can be described as a legal labyrinth…

So Rare developed the game for the N64. However, Microsoft bought the studio, although GoldenEye 007’s publishing rights remained at Nintendo. (And yet, Rare worked on this project allegedly in 2008, and they needed just two months or so to wrap up development…) However, Activision Blizzard made things even more complicated by releasing a remake of the game (GoldenEye 007) on the Nintendo Wii (developed by Eurocom; also a DS version by n-Space) in 2010, followed by a PS3 and X360 version called GoldenEye 007: Reloaded a year later. In late 2015, Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, explained on Twitter why Microsoft never went back to this idea: „GoldenEye rights are so challenging, looked at this many times. [There are] lot’s [sic!] of different parties to work with, we’ve always given up.”

And now, we can look at a playthrough of the cancelled remaster. Maybe if it was released, it might have taken some attention away from 2007’s Call of Duty (the first Modern Warfare game), who knows…?

Source: DualShockers