IO Interactive, the debonair developer behind the excellent Hitman series, shared some basic but important details this week about their upcoming James Bond game. While IO still hasn’t revealed how the codenamed Project 007 will play, we now know that this version of Bond will be an entirely new take on the character made with gaming audiences in mind.
The company CEO Hakan Abrak said the developer is getting a shot at creating a version of the legendary MI-6 Agent with his own continuity and qualities. It marks a big departure for the fictional character in the gaming space. Video games starring James Bond are largely based on existing films or established film versions of the character.
“It's not a gamification of a movie. It's completely beginning and becoming a story, hopefully for a big trilogy,” Abrak told IGN. “It's a Bond we built from the ground up for gamers.”
“It's extremely exciting with all the tradition and all the history there [...] to work on this together with the family of creating a young Bond for gamers,” he continued. “A Bond that the gamers can call their own and grow with.”
It’s been over 12 years since the last game based on the 007 franchise. 2012’s 007 Legends took players through a series of memorable moments from the movies (with Daniel Craig in the lead role) in a Call Of Duty-style campaign. It was not received well, as the formula that the Activision-published Bond games leaned on in the 2000s had since grown stale.
Abrak sees this long break as an advantage going into their title. While he considers the N64 first-person shooter Goldeneye a classic, he also believes there’s room for a new definitive take in games.
"I don't want to speak too big about it, but I just hope we'll do a thing that will define James Bond in gaming for years to come,” he explained. “We create a universe for gamers to own for many years to come that we can grow with that next to the Bond on the movies."
IO Interactive’s approach to adapting 007 for the modern era of games is the best-case scenario. James Bond is a well-known character who can sustain two separate versions of the character co-existing without issue. And if IO wants to nail the narrative aspects that the Sam Mendes Bond movies have excelled at, then starting with a blank canvas that can be painted with compelling twists and narrative turns is the only way to do it.
As superhero games like the Batman: Arkham trilogy, Guardians Of The Galaxy, and Spider-Man have shown, games based on popular characters are best when they’re not beholden to existing lore. A Bond game that can combine aspects of the grounded intrigue of the Daniel Craig era, the charm of Pierce Brosnan and Sean Connery’s Bond, the gritty depravity of Timothy Dalton’s films, and pretty much anything from Ian Flemming’s original novels, could be the coolest versions of 007 fans have seen in years.
Players still don’t know much about what this game will be exactly. But Abrak said that 20 years working on Hitman, which centers on “an agent that travels the world and globetrotting,” has prepared them. His comments echo that of IO’s chief development officer Veronique Lallier, who said back in July that transitioning from Hitman 3 to Project 007 “just feels seamless.”
There’s no release for the yet-to-be-titled Project 007 yet. But Abrak says development is going “amazingly well.” He promised that the team would be ready to share more in the near future.
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