Ian Fleming created James Bond in 1953, in the novel Casino Royale (adapted not once, but three times to audiovisual media). It was an immediate success and, from then until 1966, when the author died, not a year went by without a story of agent 007. Fleming got to see how his character became a movie star when Agent 007 against Dr. No premiered in 1962, but he was very, very far from seeing how his perfect British MI6 agent also transitioned to video games. Sometimes sadly, other times fortunately: studios did not always succeed in bringing Bond to computers and consoles… And, no matter how much Goldeneye you have in mind, it is perfectly demonstrable.
Shaken, stirred, and whatever it takes
In 1983, Spectrum launched the first attempt at the market, Shaken but not stirred, a conversational adventure that pleased most of the audience (although let’s not kid ourselves, it is unplayable today). That same year, Parker Brothers published James Bond 007, a hastily made platformer that already hinted at what the saga could bring us: very, very little. Anyone who was playing at that time is likely to be skeptical about 007 First Light, created by IO Interactive: after several hits against the wall, it’s unusual to want to throw yourself at it again.
Until 1997, when Nintendo 64 surprised everyone with Goldeneye, most video games based on licenses were little more than disasters. Titles like License to Kill or License to Kill (a side-scrolling shoot-em-up that was not even well regarded at the time) could hold their own, but alongside them came things like Live and Let Die, a racing game that wasn’t even born as a James Bond title: it was something called Aquablast that somehow got the license slapped on it. And not to mention the adaptation of High Tension, which strayed so far from the original work (and was so poorly understood) that a cassette came with the game in which Desmond Llewelyn, Q, explained the plot.
Another example of how they mistreated the franchise was The Stealth Affair, a graphic adventure with a completely new plot… with a protagonist who was only called “James Bond” in the United States. In the rest of the world, he was a certain John Glames, a CIA agent. A chaos that definitely did not go down in history. But even after Goldeneye, and despite wanting to stay on the right path with adaptations of Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough, we quickly returned to the path of cheap exploitation with things like 007 Racing, an unredeemable and generic racing game.
From there, once again the fall from grace: Agent Under Fire, an original story where Bond has to prevent the world’s political leaders from being replaced by clones, or Rogue Agent, in which the character is called “GoldenEye” after losing his eye and having a golden cybernetic replacement, did not help people want more James Bond. If since 007 Legends, which aimed to be a tribute to the entire saga and ended up being a soft entertainment, we haven’t had a new game until now, there must be a reason. Fourteen years have passed, and the question still lingers in the air: Have they been able, in some way, to create an action game as it should be… a proper action game that lives up to the saga?
