According to Xbox World 360, the magazine that leaked the admittedly gorgeous footage of a redone Goldeneye 007, the reason for Goldeneye 360 never seeing the light of day on XBLA is because of one man: Nintendo’s president, CEO and 2004 inter-office break dance champion Satoru Iwata.

Here is the deal: Rare (then “Rareware”) developed the original Goldeneye 007 for the N64 in 1997, which instantly became a classic, and a benchmark for console gaming at the time. In 2002, Microsoft purchased Rare from Nintendo (more or less). Meanwhile, the 007 license was tossed around for a little bit, most famously held by EA, before being picked up by Activision. In 2007, we were supposed to see the return of Pierce Brosnan’s “We’re sorry for Timothy Dalton” James Bond with GoldenEye 360. Rare even had a port to the Nintendo Wii in mind in a deal that would have included bringing Rare’s entire Nintendo back catalogue to the Wii’s Virtual Console.

Unfortunately, at the behest of Nintendo, it seems we will never get to play GoldenEye on either the Xbox 360 or Wii. But how could Satoru Iwata have say over an Xbox 360 title? Nintendo owns neither Rare or the James Bond license, after all. Well, my friends, this is where it gets a little ugly. According to the Xbox World 360 article, Nintendo apparently threatened to break ties with Activision, the current holders of the James Bond license, if GoldenEye were to appear on another console.

The agreement between the parties (Nintendo, Rare, Microsoft and Activision) allowed the game to be developed almost to completion before Nintendo’s Japanese boss Satoru Iwata decided that under absolutely no circumstances would Nintendo allow the game to see release on another platform. While Ninty apparently have neither rights to the core nor any legal means to block the release, it’s rumored that the threat to Activision’s relationship with Nintendo was enough for them to disband the project.

That is a damn shame. Especially considering earlier the article points out that Nintendo of America’s top dog, Reggie Fils-Aime, was fully behind the GoldenEye project. After all, if this article is to be believed word-for-word, all parties, even Nintendo, stood to make a fortune off of a game that people have been wanting to see either a sequel or remake of for the past ten years. I don’t know what Satoru Iwata believes Nintendo has to gain from blocking GoldenEye’s completion, but he obviously must think it’s important enough to threaten a business relationship over.

If such allegations are true, of course.

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