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When Ian Fleming first delivered James Bond to readers in 1953, Agent 007 arrived ready and raring to go. Casino Royale isn’t one of those novels that flitters about trying to slowly layer and build its protagonist into their ultimate form – Bond just already is that. In fact, it’s crucial to the narrative of the novel that Bond is an experienced agent, the best card player in the service, and trusted.
Fleming’s argument always appeared to be that Bond is a force of nature; by the time we meet him, he is already the interesting character whose exploits the audience will wish to follow – and it doesn’t matter how he got there. The man is hardened. Those first kills have happened, and are mentioned in passing. The fact that his first kills are glossed over and described so brusquely speaks to his hardened nature, in fact. It’s no big deal.
For its foray into the world of 007, Hitman studio IO Interactive is taking a different path. In a new interview with VG247 parent IGN, studio boss Hakan Abrak casually re-confirmed the nature of their Bond game as an origin story for a new version of the character that will exist in a separate canon aside from the films.
“It’s extremely exciting with all the tradition and all the history there is there together to work on this together with the family of creating a young Bond for gamers; a Bond that the gamers can call their own and grow with,” Abrak says. And, you know – I think this is a great idea.
The way I see it, there’s only two ways you can go with a James Bond game in 2024. The first option is to go for a familiar face, but make stories that are not that of the contemporary Bond. You could get the irrepressible Timothy Dalton (secretly the best Bond, by the way) back in the recording booth, for instance, and make a fabulous 80s period piece – perhaps even adapt the screenplay of his unmade third movie. Alternatively, you do an original Bond.
As a Bond fan whose knowledge of the series sadly borders on the degree-level, I’d make a strong argument that the contemporary Bond video game thing doesn’t really work in today’s age of highly story-driven games. The games of the Daniel Craig era were dogged by a desperate desire to match the tone, timbre, and canon of his movies – but they ultimately ended up brushed aside as his version of the franchise evolved film-to-film.
Put simply, the creators of the actual films didn’t care about what the games were doing. It’s telling that the Craig era’s best game is 2010’s GoldenEye, an adaptation of an older story. That game does a remarkable job of recontextualizing that very nineties narrative into the era and style of Craig’s films – but it still suffers the same problems, really. It’s a competent enough Call of Duty clone with some spy thriller chops – but it never really fit with what the Bond franchise was at the time.
All of this is a bit of a consequence of how chameleonic the Bond franchise can be. Like that other great British multi-actor character and institution (The Doctor, naturally) Bond and his franchise actually shift quite a lot. The tectonic plates move era-to-era, from the brutality and sexism of Connery at the start to Moore quipping and gurning as the soundtrack weaves in seventies disco through to Brosnan’s post cold war, New-Laboury last-of-a-dying-breed take. The next Bond on film will surely be one for the era of tiktok, cultural cancellation, and a post-truth world sliding ever closer to all-out war.
But even within an era, the parameters shift – Craig’s Bond and his films morphed tremendously across the fifteen years he spent in the role. With games taking five or more years to make, that moving target is simply too wide for a game to pin itself to.
So I’m on board with IO’s vision of an original Bond for video games – the medium can bear it, and it can actually allow for a characterization that might be more befitting for the sort of action you see in video games. There’s huge storytelling opportunities in this – but also significant risks.
Like I say, Fleming birthed the character into the pages of Casino Royale as what The Guardian’s Steven Poole correctly called “a fully-formed force of nature”, and while I think Fleming’s storycraft isn’t exactly as brilliant as his raw ideas (there have, frankly, been multiple better writers who have penned for Bond since), to go against his framework is a big risk.
What I don’t want to see, specifically, is all those bloody spy movie tropes. Yes, Bond himself established a lot of those tropes – but there’s many the Bond series has never bowed to. In a sense, this is the tricky balancing act: making sure the game and its world contains all of those lovely clichés that make the Bond series what it is, while also dodging some of the more tiresome genre elements that aren’t as key to the character or brand.
I’m all for a young Bond new to the service or at least new to Double-O status; but what I really don’t want is to tread the boards of those traditional origin stories. You know the type – here’s his mentor; his mentor gets killed. Maybe the Double-O status passes down as part of that. His first mission isn’t just a mission: it’s revenge for his mentor, and so on. A million other spy franchises have done these tales. You can do more with Bond without meandering down these cul-de-sacs.
For IO’s young Bond, hopefully the studio and its writers have looked closely at other examples where the stewards of the series have seen fit to disobey Fleming’s lack of a concrete origin.
In the movie version of Casino Royale, we do see Bond gain his Double-O status promotion by performing his first two kills – but this is in brief at the opening. The rest of the film is indeed about Bond emerging – but to deploy a clunky metaphor, rather than the movie being about a caterpillar slowly cocooning and becoming a murderous butterfly the Bond we meet at the opening of Craig’s first movie is already emerging from that cocoon.
Six and a half minutes into the movie, the words appear on screen: ‘James Bond – 007 status confirmed’. He is already Bond. He does not sob over his first kill, belabor his first mission, and we have no extended sequences of him learning from some gruff MI6 mentor he is destined to surpass. By the seven minute mark, his status is confirmed. Even the theme tune confirms it, as the late Chris Cornell croons ‘You Know My Name’. He is James Bond. The fluff is skipped.
Even more of merit to consider is Antony Horowitz’ excellent novel, Forever and a Day. After years of writers making vague additions to the Bond canon, Horowitz was the first to really bed in with the Fleming estate and write continuations of the original novels and canon; but in 2018, he instead decided to write a prequel. Here we get Bond’s first mission as a Double-O; again the man is fully-formed, but just rough enough around the edges that you can witness the mission slowly burnish him into the character we more readily recognize. It’s good stuff.
You can even learn a lesson from Charlie Higson’s Young Bond novels. That’s an entire series – but crucially, it steers clear of a young, green Bond on MI6 missions. It’s a posh orphan (a little s**t, honestly) at Eton College getting into character-forming scrapes. These are decent enough post-Harry Potter books for young adults and don’t really count, for my money – but they do enlighten something of the dos and don’ts of the character.
Basically, you can dive a little into Bond’s history just fine – but it’s a delicate balance, a difficult needle to thread. Part of the attraction of Bond is that despite knowing so much about him, he is still something of an enigma – the nature of his war service, of his parents, his upbringing – even his early years in the service of MI6.
There’s much exciting about the character, franchise, and universe to be explored in the slow-burn, longer-form storytelling that a video game can provide. There’s also thrilling gameplay options, and Hitman proves there’s unlikely a better or more synergistic fit for Bond than IO. But with all these choices, it’s vital not to dull the character’s edge. Fingers crossed that IO sticks the landing.