Prerelease:GoldenEye 007 (Nintendo 64)/Xbox Live Arcade Port

This is a sub-page of Prerelease:GoldenEye 007 (Nintendo 64).

By 2008, an Xbox 360 port of GoldenEye 007, intended to be released via Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service, was in development under the codename Project: Bean (or Bean Project). As would later be done with its spiritual successor, this port featured high resolution texture replacements, significantly more detailed skyboxes, and higher polycount character, weapon, and prop models. This prophetic text serving as a placeholder for the publisher's logo sums up the port's fate pretty well:

Do you expect me to remove this Nintendo logo screen?
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.

The port was allegedly canned because of disputes between Microsoft and MGM, as MGM wanted to censor it due to updated license guidelines that had been instituted since 1997. Nintendo (which originally published GoldenEye) and Activision (which held the Bond license at the time) were apparently insignificant players in this whole ordeal, though Nintendo did want GoldenEye on the Virtual Console around the same time.

While Microsoft officially denied the port's existence, citing that they did not have the necessary rights to release the game on XBLA, a large amount of footage from it was leaked to the press, and numerous art assets have since come to light. The game was available to download for some time via Microsoft's PartnerNET service, but no builds are publicly available yet. The port was later planned to receive an official release in Rare's 30th anniversary compilation, Rare Replay, with Rare going as far as to record a few "Rare Revealed" interviews. Unfortunately, that ended up not working out, either.

The 2007 prototype build of the game was leaked online on February 2nd, 2021.

To do: There's plenty of documented history of this port on the internet that can be added later. A full playthrough of the build that was on PartnerNET has been uploaded. See A 2007 build of the game was leaked on February 2nd 2021. Giving us insight to many features we can post on this page. Since this build has been leaked, it should ideally be moved to its own page outside out of the Prerelease namespace.

Footage

(Source: Rare Thief)

Changes

General

• The game's original textures, models, and skies can be selected on the fly By pressing RB. (The XBLA port of Perfect Dark had this same functionality during development, but it was cut from the final release, so this may have only been intended as a developers' tool.)
  • Blending on the clouds in the skies is done incorrectly, making their coloration much more vivid than it is on the Nintendo 64.
  • Environment mapped textures don't seem to render the same as they did in the original game.
• The game runs at 60 frames per second under normal circumstances—this target frame rate is constantly printed in green on the top-left corner of the screen. When the frame rate does drop, the value is drawn under the 60.000 target in pink.
• Gadgets can be cycled like weapons during gameplay, rather than needing to be selected via the menu.
  • As in the original game, gadgets (and unarmed without a sniper rifle) have no visible model in first person. Instead, their name is printed at the bottom right of the screen, next to their ammo count (if applicable), when they are selected.
• The left half of the scrolling text screen texture now features developer names:

Laurie Cheers

Dave Herod

Sergey Rakhmanov

Ross Bury

Keith Rabbette

Chris Woods

Chris Tilston

Mark Edmonds

• Bug: RGB values for secondary geometry are not used for the new graphics, resulting in things such as the red circle behind the GoldenEye logo on the title sequence, the red Russian text on crates, or the yellow caution stripes on Silo's doors being rendered in gray.
• Bug: Sometimes character heads don't load.
• Bug: The tops of the new skyboxes do not render correctly.
• Bug: The suit_lf_hand model shows all of Bond's possible cuffs, rather than just the one for the outfit he's currently wearing.
• Bug: Music changes during missions are non-functional.

Menus

• An ESRB disclaimer, "Game Experience May Change During Online Play", has been added under the logo.
• Complying with Microsoft's standards, button graphics and text descriptions for their functions have been added to the menus.
• Leaderboards, Achievements, Help & Options, and Return to Arcade options have been added to the first page of an agent file.
  • Cheat Select Mission is now a separate option from Select Mission.
• The watch menu is titled Q watch v3.01 sp2 and has had resume mission, equipment, help & options, leaderboards, and achievements added to its first page. The menu is clearly unfinished, as these new options are drawn over the currently selected weapon.
  • The text for aborting a mission has been made more verbose.

Multiplayer

• Dam, Frigate, and Depot have been added to the list of available levels.
  • Dam's setup isolates a portion of the dam and the service tunnel under it.
• A new option has been added: Unequal Character Heights. Without this on, characters are scaled to the same height, unlike the original game. It defaults to off.
• An option for vertical screen split when playing with 2 players has been added.

Levels

Dam

• Snowy, tree-lined hills and additional mountains have been added beyond the tops of the original mountains when playing with enhanced graphics.

Facility

• The double agent that Bond has to contact for the door decoder is Dr. Rakhmanov, not Dr. Doak. Doak's name and appearance was based on a Rare developer, David Doak, who was a member of the original GoldenEye development team. In the same vein, Rakhmanov is based on Sergey Rakhmanov, who was senior artist at Rare at the time this port was underway, and whose name appears on the updated scrolling screen texture.

Surface 1

• The original tree border has been replaced with a chainlink fence when playing with the new graphics. A tree wall is still present, but is farther back, with more snowy plains and modeled trees beyond the fence. The skybox features distant mountains.

Silo

• Bug: The ICBM model is incorrectly occluded when viewed from some places.
• Bug: The elevator doors never fully close during the outro.

Cradle

• The skybox features the antenna dish and jungle cliffs when playing with the new graphics.

Aztec

• The stone areas of this level have been given an overgrown appearance, including some new (untextured) vine models in the area with the bridge, in the new graphics.
• The room with the screens from Moonraker has painted murals on the stone walls, and new partially untextured light models have been added.
• Bug: The space shuttle model is incorrectly occluded when viewed from some places.

Complex

• Grass has been added to some rooms when playing with the new graphics. Palmtrees and scaffolds can be seen through the skylights.
• The sky has been changed from red to blue in the new graphics, but the fog is still red.

Developer Placeholders

• If a text file were to be edited incorrectly or deleted, the text will be replaced by the placeholder "WHO THE FUCK BROKE BUILD?" and can be caused as simple as changing one line incorrectly.

Rare Replay Interviews

The XBLA port was intended to receive an official release in Rare Replay, Rare's 2015 compilation celebrating their 30th anniversary. Rare went as far as to produce "Rare Revealed" interviews for inclusion in the compilation. Ultimately, GoldenEye didn't make the cut due to licensing issues and the fact that it was not a Rare-created property. A former Rare employee leaked the interviews that were meant to be included in late 2019.