Cancelled GoldenEye 007 XBLA remaster fully revealed in 2-hour gameplay video
A Rare find.
Rare's cancelled Xbox Live Arcade remaster of its seminal N64 shooter GoldenEye 007 has been revealed in its entirety with a two-hour playthrough video.
The video below, published on the YouTube channel of GoldenEye 007 content creator Graslu00 (via GoldenEye Dossier), shows the full game played on the OO Agent difficulty 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 higher resolution.
In 2007 Microsoft-owned Rare developed an HD remaster of its N64 classic to be released on XBLA, but copyright disputes saw the project shuttered. Before this video, only 30 minutes of footage of the game had been released. Now we see the game in all its glory - from its iconic opening Dam level to its final bonus level Egyptian - all with an acceptable framerate!
In a tweet, Graslu00 insisted this gameplay is not related to any recent leak. Rather, builds of the game were obtained years ago from PartnerNet, a sandbox version of Xbox Live available only to dev kit owners. According to Graslu00, a build of the game will be released at some point in 2021.
While the XBLA remaster never saw the light of day, we did eventually get a full remake on the Wii with the identically-titled GoldenEye 007 in 2010. This version, developed by Eurocom and published by Activision, was later given an HD port on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as GoldenEye 007: Reloaded in 2011.