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No GoldenEye For Xbox Live
Joystiq reports that, as revealed on a recent VGM podcast, GoldenEye is not likely coming to Xbox Live anytime soon. From the article: "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."
EA owns the current Goldeneye/Bond license, not Microsoft or Rare. So, to publish Goldeneye on Xbox Live, Microsoft would have to deal with EA which they clearly do not want to do. It's too bad; I'm sure Goldeneye on Xbox live would be a monster seller. I don't think space limitations are the issue, the biggest N64 games were 65 megabytes.
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.
Actually, Nintendo has already stated that N64 games will be part of this, so bzzt - wrong answer.
And anyway, the ROMs themselves aren't that big. 16 MB tops if I remember correctly. I'm sure Nintendo could set this up in such a way that, assuming the entire game image isn't downloaded before execution, the critical components are downloaded first and then the remainder streamed as the user plays the game. Of course, Nintendo does pride itself on presentation quality, so my best guess is that they'd force a complete download before execution, so that a network service interruption doesn't cause the game to crash or pause because the download stalled.
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The size issue is pretty lame. When you have a service like Live delivering HD trailers at hundreds of MB in size, I would think a rom cartridge from the N64 would be a piece of cake. Case in point is Goldeneye. 96Mbits. That's only 12MB of disk space. If you make multiple copies of that on the 13GB partition, you would have over 1000 copies. To be fair, though, games like Smash TV are about 6Mbit in size so it would be larger than that.
It doesn't matter who owns Rare. The games that were published by Nintendo are (partly) retained by Nintendo. That includes the games I listed above - which for the most part are Rare's most popular games.
Some games, such as Conker and Jet Force Gemini, were published by Rare. This is why M$ gets full rights to these games.
The flip side is that Nintendo can't release those Rare games either. They will only exist "as-is" unless more negotiations take place. I doubt any of the parties will bend on this.
EA has the Bond license.
EA is the publisher for Free Radical, which employs most of the original Goldeneye team and produces games with a greatly enhanced version of the Goldeneye engine (or at least a Goldeneye playalike).
Call me crazy, but:
Bond license + next-gen engine = killer, multiplatform, online Goldeneye remake
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It won't happen for these reasons:
1. The James Bond license, in a complete switch from the usual state of things, actually makes the game much cooler.
2. Emulating an N64 is still not trivial, would rely on using information that would have to be gained in a clean-room reverse engineering, and even then may be subject to a lawsuit from Nintendo. Of course they could always look at public emulators, but I'm unsure that wouldn't carry its own liability.
3. The ROM has Nintendo's logo all over it, all that would have to be scrubbed. Further, I'm reasonably sure Nintendo actually owns the copyright on the game. They were the original publisher in any case.
However, the game's size is likely NOT a determining factor. The Wikipedia page for Goldeneye 007 states that the game's ROM is 16 megabytes. The size limit for Xbox Live Arcade games is 50 megabytes. Even counting in twice the game's ROM size to hold an emulator, it would still probably fit.
However, consider this: Rare still probably has the source code and art assets for the game. They could probably recompile the game to make use of the X-Box 360's hyperflash sparklemagic technical pixie thingies. In fact, they would have to do this, otherwise people would laugh at how the 360 now has a FIRST-GEN N64 GAME WITHOUT ANY GRAPHIC ENHANCEMENT, gasp! So that means, at the very least, better textures.
The N64 game's ROM was only that small because it used heavy texture compression and because people weren't accustomed to 360-level texture sharpness. Look at it now: the game is still cool, but it's blurry as hell. Unfortunatly, to improve the textures would probably greatly increase the game's size, and that 50 megabyte Live Arcade limit looks like a hard (if arbitrary) one.
That's speculation of course, but it sounds about right to me. Anyone care to subject it to the iron knifeblade of reason?