GoldenEye 007 remastered for Xbox 360: Rare's Project Bean

GoldenEye 007 came out on the Nintendo 64 in August 1997, developed by Rare and published by Nintendo. Ten years later Rare rebuilt it in HD for Xbox Live Arcade on the Xbox 360, under the codename Project Bean. The remaster was finished or close to it when the companies holding the rights failed to agree, and it never went on sale. The only way anyone has played it since is a build that leaked in 2021. In June 2026 a fan made that build run natively on PC.

Rare built Project Bean in about a year with eight people

The remake was made at Rare during 2007 and 2008, by a team of eight in about a year. Rare worked with 4J Studios on it.

The footage that surfaced later shows a faithful job. It kept the full single-player campaign, ran at 60 frames per second and used new high-resolution textures. The game could switch instantly between the HD look and the classic N64 look. The N64 mode was a graphics filter over the new game, not a port of the old one.

Rare planned online multiplayer next to split-screen, with Dam, Frigate and Depot as new arenas, plus over 200 Achievement points and time-trial leaderboards. The developers had their faces scanned to appear as enemies, civilians, scientists and naval officers.

Two details are funny in hindsight. The remake had an option to make every character the same height, which took away the height advantage of Jaws and Oddjob in multiplayer. The Citadel level was reportedly considered as a multiplayer arena just "for the fan reaction."

Licensing killed it in 2008, months from completion

Unseen64 says the remake was canned only months before completion, and the accounts of why differ. In Unseen64's version, Microsoft and Nintendo agreed to a licensing deal with Activision, then the holder of the James Bond game license, and Nintendo Japan allegedly refused permission at the last minute. Wikipedia names Nintendo, MGM and Microsoft as the parties that never reached an agreement, and puts the remaining work at about two months.

Composer Grant Kirkhope, who was not on the project, put it more simply: "The main reason it didn't happen was because there were too many stakeholders."

Microsoft kept running into the same wall afterward. On December 8, 2015, Phil Spencer answered a fan who had asked for a Rare-made remake: "Goldeneye rights are so challenging, looked at this many times. Lot's of different parties to work with, we've always given up."

Perfect Dark, Rare's other N64 shooter, got its Xbox Live Arcade remaster from 4J Studios on March 17, 2010. Microsoft Game Studios published it. Its multiplayer included GoldenEye's weapons.

How it leaked in 2016 and 2021

The first public look came in August 2016, when a leaker called Rare Thief posted about 30 minutes of footage. Engadget's write-up says Activision was porting the game, which looks like a mix-up with Activision's separate 2010 GoldenEye 007 for Wii and DS. Rare made the remaster.

The full game came out in early 2021. On January 30, the YouTuber Graslu00 uploaded a 4K, 60 frames per second longplay of the whole campaign on 00 Agent, bonus levels included, plus about half an hour of multiplayer. On February 3 a near-final ROM was circulating on file-sharing sites. The same day it was shown running at native 4K on Xenia, the Xbox 360 emulator for PC.

Footage of the reportedly canceled Assassin's Creed Destiny also reached the public through a leak, in October 2026.

The planned online multiplayer mode is not in the leaked ROM. The Achievements don't fully work either.

A fan recompiled it for PC in 2026

The leak got a second life in June 2026, when a GitHub user called SunJaycy released GoldenEye Recomp. It is a static recompilation, which means the Xbox 360 code is translated into a native Windows program instead of being emulated. Generation Amiga lists 60 FPS, controller input, resolution and frame-limit settings, and online multiplayer as the headline extra, with one player running a server for the others. Rare had planned that online mode in 2008.

The project ships no game data. Its README says "You must provide your own game files". The README also warns that AMD graphics cards may crash and that AI was used during development. The author's reason takes two sentences: "This started because I love GoldenEye and wanted to see it running natively on PC. That's it."

Where to play it today: the 1997 game, not the remaster

The remaster is still not for sale anywhere. The 1997 game is back, though. It arrived on January 27, 2023 on Xbox Game Pass and in the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack library. The Switch version is the N64 game, and it is the only one of the two with online multiplayer. Nintendo lists two to four players in its multiplayer mode and says it works with an N64-style controller sold separately.

The Xbox version was developed by Code Mystics and offers 20 campaign missions, cheat modes and split-screen for up to four players, at 4K. It is not the Project Bean build, and it lacks online multiplayer.

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Questions people ask

Why was GoldenEye banned in Germany?

Germany put the N64 game on its list of media harmful to young persons, which barred it from sale and advertising to minors. The listing was lifted in October 2021, 24 years after release.

Is there a remake of GoldenEye 007?

There are two. Activision's 2010 game for Wii and DS is a remake with Daniel Craig's Bond, and its HD version, GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, came out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in November 2011. That makes Reloaded the GoldenEye you could actually buy on Xbox 360. Rare's own remaster of the N64 game was canceled in 2008 and exists only as a leaked build.

When was the GoldenEye 007 game released?

The N64 original came out in Japan on August 23, 1997, and in North America on August 25. British players had it on November 7. The Xbox and Switch re-releases followed on January 27, 2023.

Is GoldenEye 007 available on Steam?

No. The 1997 game is sold on Xbox and Nintendo Switch only, and the canceled remaster has never been sold anywhere. On PC it runs only through Xenia or the fan-made Recomp, and both need the leaked files.