The name's Bond. James Bond. Regulars to this channel will know all too well at this point that I love me some James Bond video games. Here he goes again, they'll say, rambling on about how much he loves some average decades old movie tie-in products. But yes, well, everybody needs a hobby. I was a kid of the '90s and the early naughties, and I have so many happy formative memories playing Golden Eye Multiplayer on the N64 with my friends. Nightfire on the Gamecube was truly the first time I really felt like I was playing through a proper cinematic Bond adventure. I remember being so hyped when Everything or Nothing came out in the middle of a Bond film news dry spell. And indeed, the games were wonderful little bridges between the movie releases.
Golden Eye was obviously a huge cultural and critical success, and Bond Games seemed happy to coast on the coattails of that game for a while, or at the very least try to emulate much of what made that game so fun and memorable. And despite never reaching the same dizzying heights of pop culture recognition, we were still treated to a steady stream of James Bond adventures on a variety of consoles over the years that kept fans like myself very happy. Heaven. Definitely heaven. That is until 007 Legends came along and managed an impressive trifecta of failure, being critically ravaged, selling poorly despite the promotional benefit of coming out during Cinematic Bond's 50th anniversary year and tying into the release of Skyfall and ultimately contributing towards the closure of its developer Eurocom being the company's final game release. It was a pretty sad end to a relatively reliable relationship with Bond, the studio having developed previously the likes of Nightfire, the Golden Eye remake, the N64 version of The World is Not Enough, amongst others.
And yeah, as of this video being uploaded, since 2012, there have been no new Bond games released on home consoles. Yes, Golden Eye got a re-release on the Xbox and the Switch. And yes, we had 007 Cipher on Apple Arcade, and I want to get into that in a bit more detail in a little while. And yes, we do have the IO interactive game on the way, but that was announced nearly 5 years ago. So, it's been 13 years now since we had a proper James Bond video game, and it's all down to you, 007 Legends. Well, it serves them right for casting Will Ferrell as Bond for the game instead of Daniel Craig.
Good evening, Mr. Bond fans. I, like many, assumed that it was down to the poor performance of this game alone, as to why after having a steady stream of Bond games for decades at this point, the well suddenly ran dry, even when it would have made sense to have a Bond game to release as a promotional tie into the likes of Spectre or No Time To Die. And yet there's been some evidence lately to imply that the failure of 007 Legends might have just been a convenient excuse to not make more Bond games as frankly it doesn't seem like Productions had all that much love for them.
Principally, I'm referring to comments made by former Activision head Bobby Kotick who appeared on Grit, a business podcast that features interviews with CEOs, business leaders, and the like. The podcast was certainly not focused on James Bond specifically at all. In fact, the comments from Kotick that ended up doing the rounds in the news were really just a complete tangent. And yet, Kotick revealed so much and answered so many questions and suspicions a lot of us have had for years with his comments. Here's the clip.
[Audio Clip]
Okay, there's two or three games that I still play today. Still have an N64. My favorite console all time is a Genesis. Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. and Golden Eye. Those three games, Golden Eye is still the best gun game ever. Those three games on Nintendo 64 I could literally play for the rest of my life. You're probably also defining. Is that a really hot take? How old you were when is that a crazy hot take? Golden Eye is what actually sold the N64. Golden Eye is the only game I've ever seen where people knew the names of guns the way car fanatics know the names of cars. Right. We made a sequel and it was a challenging thing to make because Barbara Broccoli did not really want anything that was violent. What I'll tell you is she and her brother, they are great custodians for the IP. Yeah. And I understood where she was coming from. She's like, you know, if kids are going to play us, I don't want guns. Can you do something other than guns? And I was like, no. Because the expectation is going to be the original Golden Eye. That's what we have to do.
We struggled with being able to actually get something done that would be great. But I thought that making a Golden Eye sequel was a great idea. What we heard was you can no fragging. You can't shoot anybody in the back. And there always had to be a big water scene at the beginning of the game. It's like, okay, well, we can we can put up with the water scene, but you can't do an open world shooter where you can't shoot somebody from all in 360°. No, it started with no shooting. I mean, I never heard that. That's crazy. Yeah. No, I went to the meeting. I was like, you know, it's just not going to work.
So, Barbara Broccoli didn't want James Bond to use guns or to kill people in a James Bond video game. Has Barbara seen any of the films she made? I'm just a professional doing a job. Me, too. But yeah, sure. I'm the one with the unreasonable expectation that there are going to be guns in a James Bond video game. To suggest this in relation to a spiritual successor to the Golden Eye video game is especially jarring because like yeah, what would you expect? Of course, there are going to be guns. You're going to shoot your opponents. That's kind of the whole deal.
I mentioned 007 Cipher earlier. It's the closest thing we've had to a fully-fledged James Bond video game experience since Legends. And it's clear that this game was affected by Eon's no guns, no killing policy. Bond doesn't actually kill enemies in the game, but rather puts them to sleep. Stealth tactics are encouraged, and there are very few instances when you're encouraged to go wild with the bullets. In fact, the ammo capacity on most of the weapons is pretty low anyway. So, even if you wanted to go in all guns blazing, you wouldn't really be able to sustain a spree for very long.
Now, I really did love playing through 007 Cipher, and I think it's a crying shame that it doesn't look like we're ever going to get any more of that game. And I don't think that the gameplay necessarily suffered all that much from an emphasis on stealth and non-lethal tactics. I had a great time with it all the same. And in game, you the fact that the whole thing is taking place inside James Bond's head, you know, the fact that enemies go to sleep rather than a kill, it's fine, whatever. But enforcing such a rule on developers is still quite limiting, especially when like Golden Eye for the N64 is still what a lot of people think of as being the apex of James Bond in gaming. And that game set most of the expectations as to what an audience expects when it comes to James Bond games.
It's like Golden Eye came out for the N64 and were like, "Oh no, we've signed off on one of the most culturally significant achievements in gaming. We've created a product that is so universally loved and adored and is selling really well. Let's never repeat ourselves. And yeah, maybe Golden Eye was just a blip. Ion had signed off on James Bond video games previously, but Golden Eye was such a big success and really was on the cusp of a more realistic kind of immersive gaming. I mean, yes, this was considered about as realistic as console gaming could be at a certain point. And I guess with that came extra consideration from the folks at Eon as to what they were really signing off on. Sure, you could kill people as Timothy Dalton's James Bond in the Jewel for the Sega Mega Drive, but it's a very different thing to shoot a cartoony soldier and they fall over and are dead as opposed to what you see in Golden Eye where soldiers get bloody and react in pain to being shot in a specific part of their body.
And while we're on the subject, Golden Eye had blood, you had the ability to kill a civilian or two and still complete your mission, and there were no restrictions on which multiplayer characters could kill each other. So, if you wanted to have a Bond versus Natalya deathmatch, you could have it. These features were largely stripped from Bond games moving forward. So, there's no blood. Uh, if you kill civilians, that's an immediate mission over. And, uh, they made it so that good guy characters could not participate in modes where they need to kill one another. But this is at its most egregious in the world's not enough for the N64, I think, where you have a gigantic roster of characters, including Judi Dench as M for Christ's sake. And yet, you cannot be M and your friend you're playing with cannot be Moneypenny in the same deathmatch because good guys can't shoot each other because, uh, well, someone at the company decided that that was a bad thing for some reason.
I appreciate brand guidelines and what have you, but I don't think that the ability for James Bond to kill the likes of Valentin Zukovsky in a free-for-all multiplayer deathmatch really severely hampered anyone's perceptions of the James Bond character, did it? It feels like a demand. It feels like a rule that was imposed from someone who doesn't actually play video games. You can see the games react to this restriction in the years that followed. In Agent Under Fire, for example, Bond is the only good guy character you can be in the multiplayer. They did sneak in Zoe Nightshade, and she is the Bond girl of that game. She is a skin that you can select in the multiplayer, but it's under the premise that the character is her evil clone, which is pretty funny. Like, yeah, the clone is featured in the game, so it's fine. But just the fact that they have to specify that in the game itself is telling.
And in Nightfire, there are far more bad guy character options than good guy ones, meaning that you and your friends have to rush to secure a good guy character ahead of each other if you're really desperate to play as Pussy Galore in a free-for-all deathmatch because once you select her, no one else in your party can pick a good guy character. There was also more of an emphasis on stealth gameplay and non-lethal takedowns as the series went on. Using Nightfire as an example again, in that game, you are awarded far more points for subdued and surrendered enemies than you are of simply dispatched ones. You have to think that these mechanics were introduced as a way of keeping Eon happy.
I think it's quite telling in Bobby Kotick's comments on that podcast that he reveals that he had to flat out say no to Barbara Broccoli's request and she evidently was talked around that yes, having a sequel to GoldenEye in which James Bond does not fire guns or kill people is, uh, mental. But perhaps the failure of 007 Legends was basically the last straw for her. And after that flop, she felt much more confident in putting her foot down and not signing off on future Bond games that didn't align with her vision. And you know what? I don't even mean to be entirely dismissive of Barbara Broccoli's worries about Bond becoming a mass murderer in the games because, yeah, 007 Legends is probably the worst offender for being a mindless shooter in which level after level is spent senselessly mowing down waves of guards after waves of guards.
And for some reason, this game brought back blood appearing when you shoot enemies, which is strange for a fan like me who is far more used to the gray dust appearing in the likes of Agent Under Fire. But yeah, I guess if you're the kind of person who doesn't like violence in video games and you see 007 Legends, it ain't going to win you around much. At the heart of this is obviously the worry that kids are going to be playing this game and they don't want kids to be playing anything violent. But hey, I and many others misspent a childhood playing Golden Eye on the N64 with friends, and we all turned out fine, didn't we? He's a psychopath.
I do wonder if this is also a reason as to why we haven't seen many re-releases of some of the older Bond games on newer consoles. Now, Bond video games are a bit of a licensing nightmare, I admit, but the original Golden Eye finally got its due on the Switch and Xbox in early 2023, and it would be awesome to think, yeah, Nightfire, Everything or Nothing from Russia with Love could finally be re-released someday. And maybe with Eon out of the picture now, it's more likely to happen if Amazon see it as a quick and easy way to make a little bit of a profit.
Now, I'm certainly not saying that Eon themselves are solely responsible for why we don't see Bond games released anymore. But it stands to reason that if people there just weren't all that fussed about how Bond games were in the first place, then they're not exactly going to be leading the charge on getting all the various companies involved to come together and get them re-released. And when it comes to making new Bond games, look, I know that there are a lot of mitigating factors as to why publishers would have been cautious about picking up the 007 game license after 007 Legends. I mean, the last couple of Bond games released by Activision didn't sell all that well, and publishers at that time were largely focusing on their own IPs and franchises. So, the tradition of the blockbuster movie tie-in game as a guarantee was kind of winding down.
So, add to that the fact that publishers and developers now had to contend with a rights holder who didn't like guns and killing in James Bond video games. You have a kind of a perfect storm for inactivity, which is nuts. I mean, the damn 007 logo has a gun in it for Christ's sake. But the IO interactive game is still being made by all accounts. And while that game was signed off on during the Eon stewardship, I do wonder if the developer now has a new lease of freedom to add in some more lethal elements and gunplay that would have at one time been nixed by Eon.
Probably not. I mean, the game's story premise is apparently James Bond earning his 00 status. And in order to do that, Bond will need to kill two people. But I have a feeling that outside of those two kills, the game play will largely focus on non-lethal takedowns and stealth tactics, which may be all well and good. I'm certainly not saying that a Bond game needs to give players the ability to mow down two dozen guards within the space of 5 seconds in order to be good.
But I also don't want the gameplay to feel arbitrarily restricted or too sanitized. I mean, yes, James Bond is a character that kills people. There are many films where he kills a lot of bad guys. It's a part of his job. It's a part of the action of those films. And I think to pretend otherwise is naive when it comes to games where the point is surely to make the player feel like they are playing through a cinematic James Bond adventure. Or maybe Barbara was just really bad at Golden Eye multiplayer and as a result she decided that no one else was allowed to have any fun with Bond video games either.
Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments section below. Am I being a bit too harsh on Eon Productions in this video? Please do let me know below. And also below there are links to my various social media pages and of course the subscribe button and the bell notification button. So, be sure to click those to stay up to date on future video uploads. And with all that being said, and until next time, Bond fans. So long for now.