While the rumors about GoldenEye 007 on Xbox Live Arcade have gone rather quiet lately, one man would really love to see the classic N64 shooter hit Nintendo’s Virtual Console, despite accepting the fact that it will probably never happen.
“There’s always someone with some exclusivity agreement, so there’s lots of lawyers … I’m not going to hold my breath,” admits designer Martin Hollis. “I’d love it to happen, but I can’t see it.”
We all like to dump on licensed games for being rubbish, and most of them are. However, the GoldenEye debacle shows what happens when a licensed game turns out to be good and can’t ever get a re-release thanks to so many hands being in the legal pot. This is why we’ll never see any of those awesome old Aliens games appear on any download services, and that’s a real tragedy.
In a way, licensed games being terrible are a sort of blessing. At least we’ll never miss them.
