GoldenEye 64 unlikely for re-release on Xbox Live Arcade, rumours squashed

16-Apr-2006 • Gaming

Microsoft officials responded this week to rumours surrounding the re-release of the Nintendo 64 classic 'GoldenEye 007' on Microsoft's new Xbox Live Arcade for the Xbox 360.

Aaron Greenberg, Xbox Live Marketplace staff member cast a dark shadow on the possibility of Rare's classic being reborn under the Xbox banner in a recent interview with gaming website VGM fusion.

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?"

Greenberg: "I would say 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]."

The report comes only weeks after industry experts cited odds that a re-release on the new Nintendo Revolution system were slim.