Ask any old-school gamer and they will tell you that the James Bond tie-in "Goldeneye 007" was one of the best titles made for the Nintendo 64 in the late 1990s.

Almost a decade later, the original developer, Rare, was developing a remastered version of this game for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade. However, this remastered version became entangled in rights issues and was quickly cancelled. Now the lost game has leaked onto the Internet and can actually be played.

Fans of the original "GoldenEye" finally got a glimpse of this mysterious lost title, with several videos on YouTube of people playing the game, all of them nostalgically happy.

The game can be played with the Xbox 360 development kit or a Xenia emulator on a PC. The emulator requires a moderately powerful rig, but it is playable enough.

Where did this leak come from? Goldeneye 007 was released on the Nintendo 64 in 1997, and the British development studio Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002.

At some point in the Xbox 360's lifecycle, Rare developed a remastered port of Goldeneye for Xbox Live Arcade. However, the game ran into licensing issues and had to be abandoned, even though it was nearly finished by August 2007.

The game was offered to PartnerNet, a service that allows developers and reviewers to share game code online through an Xbox 360 development kit.

PartnerNet's security was not very tight, so whenever a game appeared on the service, almost anyone with an Xbox 360 development kit could download the latest game code. On one occasion, "Goldeneye 007 Remaster" ran on the service for about an hour

, and on another occasion, "Goldeneye 007 Remaster" ran on the service for about an hour

.

According to YouTuber ModernVintageGamer, Microsoft often took development kits to the landfill. Resellers scoured landfills for development kits and sold them on the open market. In other words, for a few hundred dollars, the average person could obtain a development kit and access PartnerNet.

The remastered GoldenEye game runs at 720p instead of the original standard definition, with higher resolution textures and a 16:9 or 21:9 aspect ratio. The game itself is available on the Internet and can be found on at least one publicly accessible website without requiring a password or login.

In 2010, Activision released the Goldeneye 007 game for the Wii and Nintendo DS. This was a reworking of the original N64 title. The game did not receive as much praise as the original version, but it was a decent title, currently scoring 81 on Metacritic.

A year later, a high-resolution port of the game was released on PS3 and Xbox 360 under the title GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, with the PS3 version allowing PS Move controls and adding the same motion options as the Wii version a year earlier. It received a Metacritic score of 72.

The remastered version of Goldeneye 007 is still in legal limbo. Microsoft, Nintendo, MGM, James Bond rights holder Aeon Productions, and even Activision may have to agree on copyright issues, and the actors in the 1995 film Goldeneye will have to agree to use their portrait rights. Given that an official remake or remastering may never happen.