Goldeneye on Xbox Live Arcade, not likely

[Dominus Atheos]

Xbox 360 Central recently sparked a promising rumor, reporting that VGM Daily's Wednesday (4/12) podcast revealed "Microsoft [is] hoping to bring N64 title Goldeneye to XBLA." However, upon review, the interview with Xbox Live Marketplace team member Aaron Greenberg (featured in the podcast) casts a dark shadow on the possibility of Rare's classic reborn under the Xbox banner.

Here's our transcription (via Conrad Quilty-Harper):

VGM: It was recently made clear both by Rare and Microsoft that all the Rare owned licenses are owned by you guys now. What's the likelihood of a game like Goldeneye that was on the Nintendo 64 showing up on Xbox Live? 'Cause that game would do rather well ... ohhh, there's the smile! 'Wait for E3!'

Greenberg: No, the smile was just that you guys are asking very good questions. So, here's the best way to answer that: 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. 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. So yeah, we're excited to have Rare as a developer ... But we don't have a big strategy around bringing a bunch of those games in particular [to the XBLA].

So... most likely, no Rare games on Xbox Live. Too bad.

[Instant Sunrise]

More likely the rights situation for Goldeneye makes it hopeless for MS.

MGM, a subsidiary of Sony, owns the rights to the James Bond franchise, which is exclusively licensed to EA. The game contains several Nintendo trademarks which would have to be removed. MS would also have to reverse-engineer an N64 emulator for the 360, which would put them in a lot of legal hot-water.

The actual game itself is only 128 Mb, which works out to 16 MB. This is well under the maximum size of XBLA titles of 50 MB(To fit on an MU). The Goldeneye engine would have to be ported to the 360, PLUS the game itself would have to be reworked to fit the publication guidelines for Xbox Live Arcade.

IF Goldeneye were to come to XBLA, EA would be behind it, not Rare.



IMHO, the original Perfect Dark has a better chance of making over to XBLA. Given that Rare/MS owns the IP for the Perfect Dark franchise.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Not that I have doubt, but, source citation?

I mean come on...