I've had a handful of lost gaming Holy Grails over the years, games that once existed, but never saw the light of day. Cancelled projects that I desperately wanted to be revived. My top 3 all happened to be based on the work of David Doak and Steve Ellis, and all three of them recently had some glimmer of hope.
TimeSplitters 4 was cancelled, but Ellis has been brought back on to revive the franchise. Star Wars Battlefront III was cancelled, but the new Battlefront II ended up being pretty good after all the updates and changes. Both of those were enough for me to stop feeling that yearning for their respective disposed-of predecessors. But the XBLA HD port of GoldenEye? Barbara Broccoli wasn't gonna let that see the light of day. Knowing that it had been nearly finished only made it worse.
Imagine my surprise when in February of 2021, the game just... showed up. It's still not clear where it came from, but some unsung hero dropped the game in its entirety onto the internet. Unfortunately, I only had a 7-year-old MacBook (Xenia doesn't run on Mac) and no 360 to play it on. When I finally decided to buy a PC this year, the VERY first game I tried on it was the GoldenEye Remaster.
It was fantastic.
It's everything it needed to be! Smooth framerate, better textures and models, better controls. It even does that thing Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary did in 2011 where you can push a button to swap between the old and new visuals on the fly, and this was meant to come out in '07! The only thing that stings about this is thinking of how fantastic it would have been to have this when I was a freshman in college, when it was originally planned to launch. The online multiplayer would have been truly incredible, but honestly I'm just glad to have it now.
This game will very likely never see a formal release. (EDIT Sep. 13 2022: I can't believe Xbox is getting GoldenEye, and it's not even this version!) I don't think there are any moral implications about acquiring a game that never had a price tag. If you liked GoldenEye on N64 and have hardware to run this, get your hands on this game.
TimeSplitters 4 was cancelled, but Ellis has been brought back on to revive the franchise. Star Wars Battlefront III was cancelled, but the new Battlefront II ended up being pretty good after all the updates and changes. Both of those were enough for me to stop feeling that yearning for their respective disposed-of predecessors. But the XBLA HD port of GoldenEye? Barbara Broccoli wasn't gonna let that see the light of day. Knowing that it had been nearly finished only made it worse.
Imagine my surprise when in February of 2021, the game just... showed up. It's still not clear where it came from, but some unsung hero dropped the game in its entirety onto the internet. Unfortunately, I only had a 7-year-old MacBook (Xenia doesn't run on Mac) and no 360 to play it on. When I finally decided to buy a PC this year, the VERY first game I tried on it was the GoldenEye Remaster.
It was fantastic.
It's everything it needed to be! Smooth framerate, better textures and models, better controls. It even does that thing Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary did in 2011 where you can push a button to swap between the old and new visuals on the fly, and this was meant to come out in '07! The only thing that stings about this is thinking of how fantastic it would have been to have this when I was a freshman in college, when it was originally planned to launch. The online multiplayer would have been truly incredible, but honestly I'm just glad to have it now.
This game will very likely never see a formal release. (EDIT Sep. 13 2022: I can't believe Xbox is getting GoldenEye, and it's not even this version!) I don't think there are any moral implications about acquiring a game that never had a price tag. If you liked GoldenEye on N64 and have hardware to run this, get your hands on this game.