Nintendo put a stop to proposed GoldenEye 007 remaster from Nightdive

In a new interview, Nightdive Studios revealed that Nintendo put an end to a possible GoldenEye 007 remaster.

Nightdive, which has brought back a bunch of classic games over the past decade, was hoping to tackle GoldenEye as one of its projects. However, that ultimately didn’t come to be. GoldenEye 007 has always been messy in terms of rights, and while Nightdive had mostly managed to iron things out, it turns out that Nintendo wasn’t on board with the idea.

Nightdive’s studio head Stephen Kick told VGC in an interview:

“That was a real heartbreak, just because we had put in a lot of effort into pitching that. We had a dream team all set up, and we got by the MGM/Eon side of things. That took a year. And then it was: ‘Ok, we’re ready to go.’ ‘Well, did you guys get the rights from Nintendo?’ ‘Wait a minute, we thought you had that.’ And then Nintendo was like, ‘yeah, no third party’s ever going to touch any Nintendo stuff, ever’.”

GoldenEye 007 did manage to make a return in 2023 with its Nintendo Switch Online release. That in itself was a victory to many – there had long been doubts that the game would be able to return in any form, so even though it’s not a remaster, we’ll take what we can get.

James Bond will be making a comeback in the video game space in the future with IO Interactive – the team behind Hitman – working on Project 007. Just recently, the title was confirmed for Nintendo Switch 2.