A fan remaster of GoldenEye 007 called GoldenEye 25 sounds like a wonderful idea, right? Unfortunately, the people who hold the rights to the James Bond franchise didn’t think so. They have also firmly made their opinions known in the form of a cease and desist letter to the makers of the remaster.
GoldenEye 25: The Words No Fan Project Ever Wants to Hear
GoldenEye 25 was intended to be a fan remaster of the 1997 classic N64 game: GoldenEye 007, and it was also intended to be released for free in 2022 for the original’s 25th anniversary. It sounded like a good deal for MGM and Danjaq: the IP holders for the James Bond franchise. They would’ve gotten free publicity for the game and their franchise at a whole. All that, at no costs to themselves whatsoever.
Unfortunately, those IP holders didn’t see it that way. Just recently, they sent a cease and desist letter to the development team of GoldenEye 25, and so, now there will be no GoldenEye 25. I guess free publicity to them meant something else.
Now that the bad news is over though, let’s talk about the good. The devs knew this might happen, so they plan to retool GoldenEye 25 into an original project under the name Spies Don’t Die.
Most of GoldenEye 25‘s assets will be reused for this Spies Don’t Die. It’s just every last mention of James Bond and 007 will be scrubbed from the final game, as per the cease and desist letter. Which is perfectly fine actually. I mean, if MGM and Danjaq don’t want to make any money off of this, might as well let the dev team do it instead, right?
The only downside here is that scrubbing out all the James Bond content will likely take a while, so it the release date might be later than 2022. However, the game’s quality means that this will be worth the wait.
Conclusion
Goodbye GoldenEye 25, and say hello to Spies Don’t Die. While the dev team will scrub all the James Bond stuff from you, we’ll know in our hearts that you’re the remaster of GoldenEye 007 we’ve been waiting for. So we’ll be waiting for you on Steam and console, whenever you come out.
Source: ComicBook
