Despite the lack of a green flag for release (for various reasons, and the fact that Amazon has bought MGM, the James Bond licensee, could be one of them…), the developers of GoldenEye 007 are still playing with a version that hasn’t been officially released.

Earlier this year, we wrote that an Xbox version of the Nintendo 64 shooter, considered one of the perennial classics, was being played. There were simple clues: the developers had earned achievements, and several sites tracked them. One of these is TrueAchievements, where you can see that a Gamertag linked to a Rare engineer has earned another one.

The BigSheep Gamertag is not a coincidence: it is linked to James Thomas, a senior engineer at Rare, who is well-versed in old games like GoldenEye 007, having worked on porting Nintendo 64 games in Rare Replay, which was released for Xbox One in 2015. The Xbox version of GoldenEye 007 (Xbox Series, Xbox One… and then most likely PC too, because that’s the trend these days at Redmond) was previously rumoured to be due for release, but it was all up in the air after Russia went to war with Ukraine, as the game has a powerful Soviet theme.

The announcement could come during the Xbox/Bethesda E3 replacement show, something we’ve been waiting for. If it does happen, the legal issue has finally been solved, as both Nintendo, Microsoft and MGM (or now we can say Amazon…) will have to agree on a new version of GoldenEye 007. Amazon might say yes because IO Interactive is quietly working on Project 007. The big N might be okay with it because the Nintendo-Microsoft relationship seems to be mostly good.

Maybe it could be the new, officially finished version of the GoldenEye 007 remaster for Xbox 360 leaked last year, never released and incomplete. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if it finally became official.

Source: VGC