Goldeneye 64 Remake (Legality and more)

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello guys,

So, we’ve already seen some Goldeneye 64 remake since the dawn of the internet and the release of the original game. Released around 2007 and still going today, Goldeneye : Source is certainly the most advanced of all. But we’ve also had mods like the Doom II one (it’s an easy one but it still counts), and some stuff done with Development Kits - Cryengine, Unreal Engine, Unity, you know them -, but done only poorly and partially.

Well, I would like to work on… some sort of epic remake of the game, on my free time, mixing the real Goldeneye movie locations and the original gameplay of the game. The problem : the legal conditions of this project. Goldeneye : Source is just a mod that you can only play by already having a game running with the Source engine. What I want to do is a standalone thing ; but I doubt of the legality of it, even if the game is not sold anymore (material and non material), nor remade, not to say that there have not been an official remake of the original game (I know there was something to be released on Xbox 360 ; and forget about Goldeneye Wii and Reloaded ; not the same game…). I wonder about this because we’ve seen some guy making a Super Mario 64 remake with Unity some months ago, but Nintendo didn’t approved that and wanted to sue the guy who made this ; even tho it was the first level only and freeware, playable directly on your browser. So the guy had to erase it’s creation from the web.

That’s why I wonder about the legal terms of this project. Would it be legal to make a freeware and standalone Goldeneye 64 remake with Unreal Engine 4, without being sued by Nintendo, Activision or Rare ? Or does Goldeneye : Source already put the limits of how far it can go (mod only) ? Couldn’t it be considered as a mod of Unreal Engine 4 itself (it’s twisted, but I never know) ? What about multiplayer only ?
Or is this game actually INVINCIBLE ???

It’s a sad thing that this cult game didn’t ressurect that much because of it’s messy licence…

What’s your thoughts about this ?

99623282376bec3184ccfb9cf7bbbf0cb7351ef8.jpeg

Goldeneye : Source page
Unreleased Goldeneye 64 Remake on X360
Someone’s Goldeneye 64 project on Unreal Engine

2

Basically, the property is still owned by some one, this means the characters, setting, names,locations,etc,etc,etc are protected. The right for the franchise alone covers this idea of remaking the game with all kinds of legal tiddly-bits that basically puts you in the grounds for being sued, whether you sell it for free or not, it’s still protected and you could be sued for doing “harm” to their project, or even the “prevention of sales” because people downloaded your free game instead of buying one of their games (new or old).

This is why it’s considered a bad idea to do remakes of games, it very rarely ends well. Some developers get lucky, and are either completely missed, or ignored by the owners of the game rights, others get a Cease and Desist orders, and some get sued. However, it’s a lot of time, money, and resource for a company to sue someone who has nothing worth suing for, but that doesn’t mean they won’t.

As far as Goldeneye: Source, they don’t have legal grounds to do what they’re doing, unless given permission. So I would imagine they just haven’t been noticed yet.

3

Hey, thanks for your comment on this. :slight_smile:

It a shame licences make things so severe sometimes…

Well, Goldeneye : Source is 8 years old already… and I imagine some Rare developers, former or not, played and enjoyed it certainly. Maybe not Nintendo (or Activision) however… :rolleyes:

What about changing / expanding some settings ? Could it be considered a fan game rather than a remake ?

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The short answer to anything regarding the use of anyone else’s games, characters, etc. is that they have all the power in the world to stop you IF they want to. Technically even drawing a fan art picture of say Super Mario is illegal.

So it all depends on who the owner of the rights is and how hard they want to crack down on fan creations. Nintendo has been quite harsh with what it allows and what it doesn’t in the past, so I personally would not want to venture into the realm of Nintendo fan games. The general rule is that companies don’t tend to act upon anything they don’t think will negatively affect their current, future or potential plans. So drawing that picture of Mario isn’t really going to do anything bad to them, but making a game (which is what their company mainly does) is obviously seen as a potential threat, so they’ll most likely try to stop it even if it’s free and you make nothing with it.

The proper way to go about any kind of fan game making, is to contact the copyright holders and notify them of what you want to do, ask if it’s okay and wait for a response. You will in virtually all cases be rejected outright. But trying to be secretive about your project and having them find out later and try to sue you, is in my view a worse option than being denied permission before you spend countless hours working on it.

PS. Game mechanics are not copyrighted. So you can make a similar game as long as you avoid any direct connections to copyrighted things.

5

Mh okay…

So the alternative would be to create a new game / licence inspired by the interested licence in question ; just like Perfect Dark or Timesplitters regarding Goldeneye 64.
And making it so original or good it won’t be felt as counterfeiting.

Mh… Anyway… To bad for Goldeneye… :frowning:

6

Mmm no, drawing fan art is not illegal.

Using someone’s IP to make money without their consent is illegal.

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If you want to get in depth on it, you can watch this hour long video of a lawyer talking about fan art.https://youtube.com/watch?v=xKBsTUjd910
But it doesn’t really matter whether or not you’re making money off of it, in legal terms you have no rights to produce things with those characters, be it a painting or poster or mug or statue. But free fan art is in most cases a benefit to the owner of the copyright holder, so there is no reason to try to stop them.

In some cases people have received cease and desist letters from copyright holders for things like making a 3d print model of a copyrighted character and putting it up on the internet for free for others to download and print. Which is the same as making a picture, but with an extra dimension.

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@FelixTayor: you don’t need a sourcce engine game anymore to play GES.
Since source sdk base 2007 became available for free a few years ago, you only need a steam account to download said SDK, which enables you to play all free source engine mods.
(ofc. mods based on sdk 2006 or 2013 need their sdk installed as well)

As for Rare employees that are aware of GES, i know that at least Grant Kirkhope had been contacted by one of our music guys sending him his tracks.

I think the developers of Goldeneye feel honored about all the fan stuff ranging from drawings and music to game content.
Publishers and licence holders are another story.
They tend to shut down projects if they feel that their financiell interrests are harmed.

As for Goldeneye Source, we allready survived the most dangerouse situation back at the time when Activision made this CoD inspired Goldeneye game.
So i guess the danger of beeing shut down is somewhat lower right now.

Nintendo isn’t exactly interrested in Goldeneye or other franchises that are not “family friendly entertainment”, they even turn Metroid into an awefull Chibi-Cartoon Kids game.
Activision gave back the licence for Bond games after Legends and i haven’t heared of a new licence holder since then.
Sony is busy making new Craig Bond Films that are not really connected to the old Bond.

From my observations, if a fangame uses any “ripped” content from a game it’s more likely to recive a C&D to stop the distribution of the content.
A game like ours where everything was made from scratch without using content from the original game, is more safe.
Also we don’t use the original actors apeareance to avoid beeing sued by them.
Our Bond doesn’t exactly look like Brosnan, allthough he reassembles certain characteristics that arev associated with Bond - same for the other Characters.

Not sure if shutting down the game after so many years would be even possible.
Lots of releases have spread all over the world.
Even if they would prevent us from doing official updates to the game, the community is very active and would provide new thirdparty content such as maps.

Also not sure if Valve could block the servers for a specific mod and if they would do it at all, because it negates their philosophy about UGC and Mods.
Once they opened that door, they’d have to remove half of the content on Garry’s Mod Workshop.

However when it comes to a new Goldeneye game created on UE4, i certainly would recommend you to create a spiritual successor with own IP rather then a Remake of this game.
The reason is simple: if it works out for you and everything goes well, you’ll be able to sell your game and make profit from it.

TBH, we talked about this topic on the GES dev team before, as well as the possibility to switch to Unity, UDK or now UE4.
We decided against it for reasons like our community.

On Source we have a lot of community content because of you only need to learn Hammer to be able to create maps.
Maybe learn some texture creation later on. Not really neccessary to learn 3D modelling.

UE4 on the other hand requires a lot of assets that have to be created in 3d Modelling software.

Also the file structure of source is very mod friendly.
Maps, models, materials, textures are exposed to everyone browsing the mods folder.
Unreal Engine packs everything into packages and AFAIK you cannot even create maps with content from a UE4 game if the creators of the game don’t provide a SDK for it.

So if an engine switch would ever happen, certainly not for the multiplayer of Goldeneye Source (hence, it would even need to be renamed then).
But once we completed everything we want for GES MP… in 2-4 years or so, who knows.
By that time we might even have Source 2 available.