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Soundwave on 24 January 2026
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OlfinBedwere said:
Soundwave said:

The damning thing about the 007 situation is I believe Danjaq/MGM (the company that owns the Bond rights) gave Nintendo first right of refusal to get the rights for future games and Yamauchi I believe was even going to do it but Rareware talked him out of it.

Pretty classic example of shooting yourself in the foot. When you have a success like that, stop overthinking it and just acknowledge you've hit on something bigger than yourself and get out of your own way. If Nintendo had secured the Bond rights, likely Rareware is never sold away in the first place and left to rot at Microsoft, so they really screwed over the entire studio. They would have be far better off under Nintendo.

To be fair, Rare wanted to take the lessons they had learned from Goldeneye and create an intellectual property that they'd own the full rights to. It's just that the plan went a bit south when the Goldeneye team broke away from the company to create their own IP.

But yeah, Perfect Dark had a huge hype train about it when it was released. Maybe it would have lost a little steam in the Gamecube era (in a hypothetical timeline where Rare didn't get sold to Microsoft), but a Rare-developed Perfect Dark game for the Wii could have been a major hit if they'd gotten the motion controls right.

Yep I understand but it was kind of a dumb idea to think you could create a character anywhere near Bond. Yamauchi should have just told them they're working on the next Bond game and that's that. 

I don't want to belabor that point but I feel like this hurt the GameCube more than things people fixate on like the mini-DVD. The mini-DVD really didn't stop any major game from being on the GameCube, you could just press an extra disk no problem and by the early 2000s there was far better compression methods than in the N64 era. You could use high bite rate MP3 to compress audio files to a fraction of the size and there was much better video compression like MPEG-4 if you really needed for whatever reason to cap out at 3 disks max.

MPEG-4 could compress your standard MPEG-2 DVD quality video of the early 2000s by a 5x compression rate, so that effectively meant a GameCube disk could store as much FMV as any full size disk game just by using a different compression format and the quality difference really wouldn't be that big of a deal. Especially at that time, we're talking about most people owning SD 480i resolution 27" inch tube TVs or smaller in most cases. I believe even better MP4 compression was even available by 2002 which would compress that file size even moreso. 

EDIT: I looked this up and apparently FFX on PS2 was 4.2 GB total but most of that file size was uncompressed video FMV and voice data, the actual game itself was 900MB only, remember there are no HD textures this is the SD era actual game data didn't take up that much space. You could have likely easily used MPEG-4 compression on the video files and reduced the audio files significantly even with the compression methods available circa 2001/2002 and put this game on the GameCube without much problem. Maybe it would be a 2 disc game, but that's not exactly a big deal. 

The reason that game didn't come to the GameCube was because Sony paid them an exclusivity deal to keep it off other platforms, simple as that.

Losing Bond and replacing it with things like Metroid Prime and Geist was a monstrous downgrade, it's one of the big reasons the GameCube sold less than the N64, N64 sold a lot of systems by having that element of being the FPS/shooter console. They just gave that away with no real fight. Again it would be like trying to replace Mario with like Chibi Robo or if that's too extreme, maybe Kirby. If the Switch 2 had only Kirby games and no Mario games, it would suffer a huge decline in sales from the Switch 1. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 24 January 2026