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[Bond, James Bond]

With a lion's share of Dos games being gobbled up by GOG, I must ask who has legal rights to Nintendo 64 Golden Eye?

GOG waits for the 20 expiration date, then grabs legal rights, updates the game for modern PC play, and sometimes modifies some of the game characteristics, such as what happened with Fallout 1. I read they took all the kids out of the game and some gamer put them back in as an add-on.

GOG is also unscrupulous, and was taken to task by Bethesda for copy rights infringement on the Fallout franchise. GOG lost the court fight.

So, my curiosity for the future of Golden Eye Source has compelled me to ask, given GOG's history of grabbing popular old games:  Who owns the rights to Golden Eye by Nintendo 64? 

The Specialist

[Graslu]

It's not about who owns the rights of GoldenEye 64 (Spoiler: No one). It's about the Bond and the film rights, and those won't expire any time soon, so don't get your hopes up about the game being released on PC or something next year when it hits 20 years old.

[Bond, James Bond]

I'm not looking for a PC game release.  My concern was an issue with an individual or someone like GOG coming in and undermining the Golden Eye mod and all the labor that has gone into re-creating it, thru buying the rights to the game.

So you're saying that some film corporation owns the rights to the film franchise James Bond & 007?  I get that.

I'm assuming that what you are saying then is that Nintendo leased the rights from the owner corporation at the time to do the game Golden Eye and that the current film company still has the rights to the Nintendo game, up to today.  Is that a correct interpretation of what you stated?

If so, then the Golden Eye face-lift is in the clear and there is no infringements on the film holders copyrights for doing the Golden Eye mod.  Is this correct?

[Graslu]

Correct. Technically nobody but MGM should be able to claim copyright on this, but they've never bothered with fan projects like films or games.

Nintendo got the rights to make an exclusive Bond game so Rare did it and released in 1997. After that, it was no longer exclusive and EA got the Bond rights for the videogames so they made The World Is Not Enough for N64, PS1, and handleds. EA kept the rights for 6 or 7 years releasing other Bond games until Activision got them to create the GoldenEye reboot released in 2010, but then they lost the rights after 007 Legends. Nobody else got the rights to make Bond games since then.

TL;DR: Nintendo, Rare, Activision, EA, Microsoft, or anybody related to the game industry doesn't own the GE or 007 rights, so we're safe in that matter. And even when they did own the rights (For the remake for example) we never got any problem with the development of this. And someone like GOG can't just "buy" the GE license since it's under Bond rights, which are owned by MGM.