The Cancelled Goldeneye 007 Xbox Remaster Was Found Online

Console gaming was never the same after Goldeneye 007 released in 1997. It helped pave the way for endless splitscreen shooters following it. This is why its such a shame that the Remaster planned for release in the early 2000s never made its way to the public. Until now, that is.

Lets back up a bit. Originally, Goldeneye 007 released in 1997 for the Nintendo 64. To celebrate the games success Microsoft and Rare were working on a modernized remaster for 2007. The project was eventually cancelled, however. Since then, its been left to be forgotten.

Or it was, until recently. A few days ago, a Spanish YouTuber uploaded a video playing through the campaign and several multiplayer maps of the Goldeneye 007 Remaster. It appeared to be a very faithful recreation, but with higher resolution options and Xbox 360 console support. To run the game, the YouTuber had to run a console emulator known as Xenia. Supposedly, a digital NFO file of the game exists online.



This was the first tangible evidence out there of the Remaster. But can it be trusted? Apparently so. Ars Technica recently managed to find it for themselves, in a rather convoluted way.

According to Sam Machkovech, the game was hiding on a publicly available website, uploaded as far back as August 24, 2007, with the title Fyodorovna. This is a reference to the middle name of Natalya Simonova, a fictional Bond character. The download came as a 7z file measuring 231MB, inside containing a folder named Bean, the games original code name.

The Ars Technica writer then documents their experience running the game on an emulator. They managed to run it with little to no issue. The emulator allowed them to run it at 4K resolution using an RTX 3080 graphics card. They reported refreshed graphics, updated textures, and a locked 60fps refresh that ran without any issues.

The leakers did make a few changes that would not be present had the game formally released. This included a patch to allow emulators, 21:9 resolution support, and the default removal of certain menu options pertaining to Xbox Life features.

One item of note that Sam had was a Toggle Updated Graphics button. At any time, they could press the right bumper button on their Xbox controller, and it would swap between the remastered graphics and the original games graphics. This gave them the ability to compare the changes whenever they wanted, on the fly.

In theory, someone else could find this same ROM, and do all of this for themselves. Gamerzunite (and our lawyers) do not support video game emulation. As such, we will not provide links to where to find them yourselves.