James Bond doesn't need an origin story: IO's game looks great, but why has it turned 007 into a baby-faced Nathan Drake?

Rich Stanton, Senior Editor

This week: I went back to Heroes of the Storm for the 10th anniversary, and played so badly one of my teammates called me an NPC. Then IO dropped the 007 First Light trailer and all I could think was "the name's Bland. James Bland."

I couldn't quite believe this when I looked it up, but IO first announced it was working on a James Bond game ("Project 007") waaaay back in 2020. There was no hard info or even a name for the longest time, but this seemed such a perfect match of developer and subject matter that it seemed this could only be a good thing.

Fully five years later, we got our first proper look at 007 First Light during Sony's State of Play and… erm, this Bond looks about 18 years old. With a serious case of Dreamworks face. OK maybe not that bad, but if you stuck Nathan Drake, Tom Holland and a young Tom Cruise in a blender, I'm pretty sure something like this guy is what would pop out.

IO has been upfront about the fact this first game is an origin story, and that was the first thing that set my own alarm bells ringing. While accepting that there have been some great examples, I hate the modern trend towards origin stories, and think in a lot of cases they actually weaken the characters concerned.

I'm not sure I ever want to know James Bond's origins in any kind of detail, and it's something that the films have either wisely steered clear of or handled in fragments. Casino Royale, Daniel Craig's debut as the character, told the story of his first truly high-stakes mission: but the character was clearly already James Bond, not learning to be James Bond. The third Craig film, Skyfall, used Bond's childhood home in the Scottish highlands for the climactic set-piece and hinted at elements of his past: but it was another layer to a character that was by this point well-established.

Casino Royale was also Ian Fleming's first Bond book, and James Bond here is already a 00 agent in his mid-thirties. Fleming's books are excellent reads, for the most part, and throughout them Bond remains somewhat in amber: barely aging, the same character going through wildly different experiences. Fleming does briefly touch on Bond's past (or origins if you prefer) before life in the secret service but, whether by accident or design, some of these explanations slightly contradict each other: at first he's an English gentleman, but in the later books Fleming establishes a more pronounced Scottish connection.

Point being that in both the original books and the movies, we are always dealing with a fully formed James Bond: he might be a bit younger or older and we might get these hints as to his past before M15, some heavier than others, but Bond's past is probably the least interesting thing about him.

Before I launch into everything I hate about 007 First Light's take on the character, a necessary caveat is that this is almost definitely going to be an excellent videogame. IO's World of Assassination is a spectacular example of what the studio can produce with Bond staples like gadgets and action-stealthing around goons, and I have no doubt that First Light is going to package all this systemic goodness up in a slightly more cinematic form. Whatever I think about this Bond, he's probably going to be the star of the second-best Bond game ever made.

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007 First Light - Announcement Trailer - YouTube

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But god, he's a smug little bastard isn't he? Doesn't the header image at the top of the article just make you want to punch him? Granted Bond is a bit smug. Pierce Brosnan was smug, Roger Moore is the king of smug, and even the harder-edged Bonds like Craig have their moments. But this Bond already looks insufferable, and we've barely heard a dozen lines out of him.

Of those lines, I thought there was one good joke in the entire trailer: when Bond and the MI5 guy Greenway are dangling above some crocodiles and Bond says to him "I suppose this is another… teachable moment?"

Otherwise this Bond is just smugging around with that awful little crooked grin on his face, looking like a rejected Naughty Dog character sheet rather than Britain's finest. And maybe that's what I'm recoiling at so much here: Bond is one of the most famous and distinctive characters in the world. The choice of each actor for the films is such a big deal because the nature of that actor dictates the tone of the films themselves: now isn't the time for Bond 101, but suffice to say Brosnan and Craig's Bonds exist in very different worlds.

This guy looks like he could be the lead in any Sony firstparty game, and you wouldn't think for a moment it was James Bond. That's my instinctive reaction and I could well be proven wrong: but for all his smugness, does this guy have even a hint of Brosnan's swagger, of Craig's menace? Of either actor's presence?

But I knew I wasn't going to like this take on the character from the first seconds of the trailer. It begins with M grimly intoning:

"His parents cut their own rope to save him. He watched them fall then found his way off that mountain… he was 11 years old."

What the fuck is this, Harry Potter?!? James Bond doesn't need parents, he doesn't need the cliche motivation of dead parents, and we definitely absolutely do not need to know anything about what happened in his life when he was 11 years old. Take this one to the bank: in the third game we'll find out Blofeld was behind the climbing accident all along!

Other massive red flags are the rogue 00 agent, in this case 009, which the movies have by this point done to death, and you're not going to top GoldenEye. But ech… I could list my issues with shot after shot in this trailer, not to mention the fact it looks like we'll be racking up a bodycount in the quadruple digits, but I am conscious of not going too far with what is merely the first trailer for a game that, again, I am sure will be a very good videogame.

But for the first truly large-scale Bond videogame in forever, this felt way too influenced by the popularity of things like Uncharted rather than the solid gold source material IO has to work with. Bond is a magical character because he's chameleonic, always somehow the same but different. The Bond films guarantee a scale and spectacle few other action films can match, and occasionally even manage a decent story.

This Bond? This Bond looks like he walked straight out of Beverley Hills 90210, like he could be the lead in dozens of other games, and like a little boy in search of a dinner jacket. I know I'm going to end up with egg on my face when this game turns out excellent. But let's just say I, for one, will be waiting for the Pierce Brosnan mods to drop.