Millenial gamers who grew up on 80s and 90s blockbusters are today being courted by the industry, with the latest James Bond offering hard on the heels of an Indiana Jones adventure and soon to be followed by “Jurassic Park.”
“I’ve worked on a lot of different projects, but always had an eye to Bond,” Rasmus Poulsen, art director for “007 First Light,” released yesterday, told AFP ahead of the game’s publication.
The Dane, in his 40s, also runs a YouTube channel showing off 3D models of spacecraft from the Star Wars and Star Trek universes — underscoring his part in a generation of game developers now turning their hands to adapting the worlds they fantasised about as kids.
With his firearms, high-tech gadgets, luxury cars and over-the-top flirting, “James Bond is a perfect fit for video games, because he’s a character built around the imperative to act,” said Alexis Blanchet, a cinema and media lecturer at Paris’ Sorbonne-Nouvelle University.
The British agent had not appeared in a game title for more than a decade before “First Light” — with follow-ups to 1997 Nintendo 64 mega-hit “Goldeneye” leaving most players neither shaken nor stirred.
“First Light” is also the first game with the Bond franchise under the stewardship of Amazon, which bought studio MGM in 2022.
Modern reboot
Built by “Hitman” developers IO Interactive, “First Light” offers a new version of Bond’s origin story, dropping players into the shoes of a cocky but callow young version of the spy still earning his stripes.
“It makes sense that Amazon’s first dip into 007 mythology should be with a game,” games and culture journalist Keith Stuart of British paper The Guardian argued in a newsletter this month.
“In the cinema, Bond’s legacy as a character has become problematic and his motivations as a modern British secret agent uncertain,” he added.
Video game adaptations of films date back as far as the late 1970s.
But they had their moment in the sun from the mid-1980s, with games often released alongside blockbusters’ appearance in cinemas.
Frequently of questionable quality, the tie-in games felt to many players like a cash grab profiting from the movies’ marketing campaigns.
