Literally, the engine was built by sitting down with graphics textbooks and figuring out every step of the way.” “Everything was coded from scratch, particularly making a 3D game on a completely new piece of hardware the N64. “There was no paradigm for what games would be in 3D,” developer David Doak told Kotaku in 2018. Unable to use real firearm brand names, the infamously useless Klobb gun was named after developer Ken Lobb because it was “loud and inaccurate”. Part of GoldenEye’s charm was its humour, stemming from the small team of British programmers who’d grown up with Bond movies on television and were practically lashing the game together with tape. Rare’s GoldenEye 007 practically launched the FPS on consoles, and for many, locked in the idea that a first-person shooter was the only way to approach a Bond game. But it was possibly the tie-in game that really relaunched the franchise for an entire generation. On film it was a gamble: a visibly cheap make-or-break film that, happily, was a hit. After Licence to Kill, there was an unprecedented six-year hiatus between films, and by 1995, Bond was pretty moribund as an IP. The growth of video gaming in the mid-eighties sadly coincided with, arguably, a low period for Bond movies: the last days of Roger Moore, followed by the not-particularly-popular Timothy Dalton films. Regardless of whose face was on the box, Bilson says, “on the typewriter side, I was always writing Connery anyway!” It adds to a movie-like experience, but whether it really matters in terms of actual gameplay is a moot point.
Film composer David Arnold provided a new version of the Goldfinger theme for 007 Legends’ title sequence. And Nightfire, Everything or Nothing, and Blood Stone went all-out for lavish original theme songs, respectively performed by Esthero, Mýa, and Joss Stone. The games even brought in filmmakers behind the scenes, like GoldenEye screenwriter Bruce Feirstein and production designer Ken Adam. Audibly more engaged was Daniel Craig, who played Bond three times for Activision (including, oddly, in a remake of GoldenEye), although not for 007 Legends, in which Tim Watson stepped into the booth to voice Bond and Auric Goldfinger. It yielded similarly flat results, although Connery looks cheery enough in the making-of footage. But he could have crushed it, and for whatever reason, it’s only fine, not great.”ĮA pulled off the casting coup of getting Sean Connery for its From Russia With Love tie-in two years later. It was more than him just coming in and reading lines he’s a great actor and extremely professional. “It was the right thing to do commercially,” writer, performance director, and then-EA executive Danny Bilson tells us, “but I’m not sure Pierce really had much patience for it. The game was developed with Caulfield voicing Bond (as he had on the previous Nightfire), until a late decision was made, at eye-watering expense, to bring in Brosnan for two four-hour voice sessions and a head scan.
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The game-changer was Everything or Nothing, an original story from EA presenting itself as an authentic new movie experience and casting the voices and likenesses of Dench, Cleese, Willem Dafoe, Heidi Klum, Shannon Elizabeth, and crucially, Pierce Brosnan himself. The only exception to the ersatz rule was John Cleese, who showed up as gadget-man R in The World Is Not Enough and 007 Racing. Caron Pascoe stood in for Judi Dench’s M in four games, for example, while Brosnan’s Bond was at various points voiced by Kevin Bayliss, Adam Blackwood, and Maxwell Caulfield. Once the technology matured, Bond games started to present likenesses but with soundalike voices. 1985’s A View to a Kill even had rudimentary synthesised speech, bellowing, “My name’s Bond, James Bond,” and – presumably M – this one: “Dammit, you’ve failed, Bond.”
The visual shorthand of a man in a tux holding a pistol was, in the early years, an easy way to sketch Bond as a low-tech sprite. Generally, Bond games try to be cinematic, with such fixtures as the movies’ famous gun-barrel intro, Monty Norman’s Bond theme, the exotic locations, and, when budget and tech allow, actors who starred in the original films. But what are the elements essential to a Bond game? Now pay attention, 007… That epochal shooter notwithstanding, arguably the most successful games are the ones that have creatively shaken up the Bondian ingredients. But there are a few odd exceptions, like text adventures, an Atari 2600 title, and the mould-breaking GoldenEye. Broadly speaking, there are three ‘eras’ of Bond games: Domark had the 8-bit and 16-bit decade (towards the end of Roger Moore’s incumbency on screen and all of Timothy Dalton’s) EA had the Pierce Brosnan years, and Activision had Daniel Craig. Video games were in on that action from their earliest years.
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