After Daniel Craig, the 007 agent franchise seems to have stalled and doesn’t know how to react. We don’t even have an announcement of the new James Bond, nor any news of the search, just rumors scattered here and there. However, perhaps it’s time for it to have a second life in video games, because it’s been a long time since we’ve enjoyed a secret agent game in the service of Her Majesty that truly excites us, right? Well, that might be about to change.
Where the joystick points, the bullet goes
Its developer is IO Interactive, the same team behind the Hitman series, and they hope that their Project 007 will result in a trilogy as it should. To achieve this, they will use everything they have learned in the nearly 25 years of their flagship series: “We feel that we have over two decades of training for agent-related fantasy, and creating one that travels the world has given us quite a bit of wisdom to do so.”
Of course, James Bond is a different franchise. “It’s huge, and it’s not ours. In fact, it’s the first franchise we’re handling that isn’t original from the start.” And to avoid diving deep into the lore or making a gamified movie, IO is going to tell the story of a young James Bond who grows up, hoping to create a new series of games that culminate in him as an adult with a license to kill.
In fact, they want to emphasize that it is a Bond created from scratch solely for gamers, not intended to please fans of the movies. Thus, they aim for players to see it as their own and want to grow over the decades. Interestingly, the idea of creating a young Bond is not new. In fact, from 2005 to 2017, ten novels with his adventures were published, and in the early 90s, there was already the James Bond Jr. series. However, it seems that this iteration of the character has been taken very seriously. We will see if it results in a precise shot or if 007 will have to return to obscurity once again.
