No GoldenEye For Xbox Live

Joystiq reports that, as revealed on a recent VGM podcast, GoldenEye is not likely coming to Xbox Live anytime soon. From the article: "I would say is that as far as I know we don't have plans to bring those types of games on Xbox Live Arcade ... Some of the games that were ... on the N64, those games were pretty large and are still gonna be pretty hard to distribute digitally depending on the title."

Misinformation

[Cutriss]

I think even if you look at what Nintendo's planning on doing in this space ... it's 8- and 16-bit games, it's not 32- and 64-bit games.

Actually, Nintendo has already stated that N64 games will be part of this, so bzzt - wrong answer.

And anyway, the ROMs themselves aren't that big. 16 MB tops if I remember correctly. I'm sure Nintendo could set this up in such a way that, assuming the entire game image isn't downloaded before execution, the critical components are downloaded first and then the remainder streamed as the user plays the game. Of course, Nintendo does pride itself on presentation quality, so my best guess is that they'd force a complete download before execution, so that a network service interruption doesn't cause the game to crash or pause because the download stalled.

Just remake it

[Phantasmo]

EA has the Bond license.

EA is the publisher for Free Radical, which employs most of the original Goldeneye team and produces games with a greatly enhanced version of the Goldeneye engine (or at least a Goldeneye playalike).

Call me crazy, but:
Bond license + next-gen engine = killer, multiplatform, online Goldeneye remake

Re:Rare games will be "Rare"

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not quite accurate. Nintendo owned 49% of Rare since the SNES days. At the end of N64 and early Gamecube era Rare really stopped being able to deliver. So they decided to sell its 49% share to Microsoft. A lot of the sale negotiations were about which properties would go with Rare and which would stay with Nintendo.

It turns out Nintendo settled for the properties that were the most "Nintendo" Star Fox and Donkey Kong. Obviously, Donkey Kong because Nintendo needed to protect its existing Donkey Kong license. Star Fox probably because at the very moment Nintendo was selling Rare they were about to release a new Star Fox game for Gamecube.

Therefore Rare keeps its back stock of intellectual property and Nintendo gets the most money it can out of Microsoft. A very good strategy considering Rare hasn't turned any of its properies into financial gains since the sale. Also many of the properties would not have been attractive to Nintendo's first and second party developers to want to work on.

Really, why not?

[MilenCent]

It won't happen for these reasons:
1. The James Bond license, in a complete switch from the usual state of things, actually makes the game much cooler.
2. Emulating an N64 is still not trivial, would rely on using information that would have to be gained in a clean-room reverse engineering, and even then may be subject to a lawsuit from Nintendo. Of course they could always look at public emulators, but I'm unsure that wouldn't carry its own liability.
3. The ROM has Nintendo's logo all over it, all that would have to be scrubbed. Further, I'm reasonably sure Nintendo actually owns the copyright on the game. They were the original publisher in any case.

However, the game's size is likely NOT a determining factor. The Wikipedia page for Goldeneye 007 [wikipedia.org] states that the game's ROM is 16 megabytes. The size limit for Xbox Live Arcade games is 50 megabytes [lockergnome.com]. Even counting in twice the game's ROM size to hold an emulator, it would still probably fit.

However, consider this: Rare still probably has the source code and art assets for the game. They could probably recompile the game to make use of the X-Box 360's hyperflash sparklemagic technical pixie thingies. In fact, they would have to do this, otherwise people would laugh at how the 360 now has a FIRST-GEN N64 GAME WITHOUT ANY GRAPHIC ENHANCEMENT, gasp! So that means, at the very least, better textures.

The N64 game's ROM was only that small because it used heavy texture compression and because people weren't accustomed to 360-level texture sharpness. Look at it now: the game is still cool, but it's blurry as hell. Unfortunatly, to improve the textures would probably greatly increase the game's size, and that 50 megabyte Live Arcade limit looks like a hard (if arbitrary) one.

That's speculation of course, but it sounds about right to me. Anyone care to subject it to the iron knifeblade of reason?