1. GoldenEye is a movie tie-in game.
2. It was made by Rare.
3. It was a Ninteno 64 game.
4. Activision currently holds the James Bond license.
5. Rare was bought by Microsoft.
Eh, you're sort of right. The way it shakes out is that through its ownership of Rare, Microsoft owns the actual intellectual property to GoldenEye 007, as in the design, the levels, the actual source code, all that stuff. What complicates things is not that it was a Nintendo 64 game--after all, there were N64 games like Blast Corps, Bad Fur Day and Banjo-Kazooie on the Rare Replay disc released for the Xbox 360--but that it was published as a second-party title, which is to say that while Rare owned the game, Nintendo owned, and owns, the actual publishing and distribution rights to the game. Further complicating things is that the Bond game rights reverted to EON a couple of years ago, and right now it's not inclined to do anything with those rights, as it's still preoccupied with finding a new distribution partner for the movies (or potentially selling the franchise altogether).
Where Activision came into play was like a decade or so ago, when Rare had developed a remaster of GoldenEye 007 with the idea of releasing it on Xbox Live Arcade. At that time, Activision did have the Bond license, so Microsoft had to work out a deal there (and eventually Activision agreed to a one-time lump sum payment). Microsoft went to Nintendo with the same offer, but somewhere along the way, someone (and stories conflict on this; some say it was Nintendo of Japan, some say it was NOA proper) dropped a stink bomb and demanded an ongoing royalty as a percentage of sales, as opposed to a one-time fee. Basically, Nintendo knew that putting GoldenEye 007 on Xbox Live would be a license to print money. After months of negotiations, the whole thing fell apart.
Coincidentally, that whole process is how we wound up with that awful GoldenEye-skinned Call of Duty game on the Wii: Nintendo saw how hard Microsoft pushed to make a deal, realized there was money being left on the table, and went to Activision and Eurocom and said, "Hey, let's try something."
