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One way or another, Bond 25 is happening. Perhaps they will have to use CGI to remove Daniel Craig’s plaster cast and crutches. They might have to procure a copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 for the director to play between takes. Either way, it’s coming. Blofeld is said to be waltzing back onto the scene. Grace Jones was cued up for a cameo but stormed off the set. And now there’s a new 007 said to be stepping in while Bond sinks and thickens into a Jamaica-baked retirement. Still, come April next year we will be queueing up, shaking with excitement and ready to be stirred. All of which is very well and good, but there remains an item of unfinished business: where is our Bond game?
If you’re anything like me, then you have my sympathies, but you will be similarly irked every time someone laments the lack of a new Splinter Cell. Not for any resentment toward Ubisoft’s series – a fine series indeed, at its best when the hero is given the full treatment by Michael Ironside, whose name is a perfect descriptor of the role: gun-grey and hard, with a touch of rust in the voice. When anyone points out that we haven’t had a Splinter Cell game since 2013, rightly highlighting a clear injustice, one of my eyes tends to twitch, and I bite my tongue before it lashes out with, ‘We haven’t had a Bond game since 2012, and a good one since 2005!’
Why on earth should this be allowed to happen? Who has the licence to kill? The last game to come out was 007 Legends, which saw Craig’s waxy likeness (though not his voice) squidged into a string of classic 007 moments – an assault on Blofeld’s snowbound Swiss fortress, from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the airless lunacy of Moonraker’s space port etc. The game provided a mild buzz, along with the laughably literal notion that it was in the brackets of Quantum of Solace and Skyfall that all the other Bond films took place – that Craig was, in fact, the author of all our joy. That game was published by Activision, but it was only one year later, in 2013, that it was pulled – along with Quantum of Solace and Blood Stone – from the pages of Steam. Three days later, Activision announced that the licence had been revoked.
Given that Activision’s Bond games seemed to spring from offcuts of Call of Duty, this bad news felt like no news at all. Ever since, rumours have sparked and swirled in shadowy corners of the industry. In 2014, Telltale Games seemed to be spying an opportunity for something fresh; Telltale president and co-founder Kevin Bruner seemed poised to deliver a different vision: ‘He’s a super-spy, and that’s a different skillset. The films make him less of a mass murderer, and there’s not much killing in the books – more spying and intrigue.’ What a palate cleanser that might have been: a game filled with talk, with espionage and quieter thrills – a Bond game with a licence to chill. In June 2017, there was talk of a Telltale project entitled ‘007 Solstice,’ but, of course, it wasn’t to be, and Telltale closed its doors in November 2018.
In 2016, Dominic Wheatley, the president of Curve Digital, said, in an interview with MCV, ‘I’d be very happy to have a James Bond licence. We could do a cracking game around that.’ Indeed, the prospect of sleuthing under the guiding hand of Curve Digital is an enticing prospect; what is James Bond if not a Stealth Bastard? These sorts of intriguing prospects are nothing new, of course, and truly fevered Bondians have been huffing the fumes of false promises for years. There was the leaked video for Raven Software’s Blood Stone follow-up, called ‘James Bond 007: Risico.’ There was 'Bond6,’ a successor to Everything or Nothing, with Pierce Brosnan to boot, that died the moment he stepped down from the films. There was MGM Interactive’s Tomorrow Never Dies: The Mission Continues, a bookend to Bond’s eighteenth outing. As ever, it’s the unrequited ideas that bear the richest romance.
Wheatley suggested, in that interview with MCV, that the larger publishers are less interested in licenced games: ‘why should they promote someone else’s brand?’ he asks. Indeed, it may be time to look off the beaten track of big-studio Bond games, in order to find a fix. (This practice will come as nothing new to those out there like myself, who look for Bond games in unexpected nooks.) Any time a new actor is courted and unveiled, paraded in front of the gunbarrel of global criticism, there’s no stifling the thrills and chills of the new and the unexpected. Could it be time for a small-studio Bond game? For something that strays from the spraying of bullets and takes aim at the heart or the head? It seems unlikely that anyone will cobble a game together in time to tie in with the new movie, and that might just be what we need.
