Hello, and welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, your host, and I’m joined today by… Matthew Castle. Don’t know why I made you say your own name there. Well, I like saying it. Oh, good, good. Well, that works out then. Just like the hero we’re focusing on today. Yes, the hero today is Bond James Bond. We’re talking about James Bond games because IO Interactive has just been announced that, well, I say just when you’re listening to this, not just, probably about a month ago. Making a James Bond game, we don’t know much about it, other than that it focuses on the origins of James Bond. And IO Interactive is the developer of the Hitman series, most famously, but also Kane and Lynch, the two games there, and Mini Ninjas. Mini Ninjas. And we’ll talk about this news in a little bit because we’ve got some quite detailed thoughts, I think, about why IO is a great fit for this series. So yeah, I mean, I suppose, Matthew, what was your first reaction to that news? We won’t go into a massive detail, but how did you react to that news on Twitter? I was thrilled. I think this is about as good a piece of video game news as you can get. I think a lot of people have dream combinations in their head and this was either one of those or the moment they heard it, you just can’t deny that it makes sense. So this was like, oh, finally, something good. Something good has happened in games. That’s what I thought. I thought, this is so good, it’s implausible that it happened. And in my head, I thought, I really want to believe that IO just went to like, I don’t know, the Broccolis or whoever has the rights and just said, look, here’s our proof of concept for what this game is. And they just went, yep, we’re not making a game right now, but yet this has captured our imaginations. It probably didn’t happen that way, but that’s what I want to believe happened. Yeah, I think so. I think Bond is, because it’s sort of good again, by which I mean it’s successful again, I’d like to think that they’re super precious so it wouldn’t happen unless it was good. Yeah, absolutely. So the first topic here, James Bond, good or bad? Now I ask this because- The whole thing, the whole James Bond. Yeah, so obviously like, I don’t really want to get into like the author, Fleming being like racist and all that stuff. And obviously he was kind of a problematic figure by our modern day standards and I wouldn’t read his books, but the films, I don’t know about your experience with Bond films, but I watched them all basically in the late 90s when I think ITV aired all of them. Yeah, every like Wednesday or something, they’d show a Bond film. Yeah, and I think that’s probably when Our Generation, well, actually that’s not true because this happened after GoldenEye had come out on N64. So it just kind of galvanized our generation’s interest in James Bond. But recently I tried to, so me and my girlfriend have watched a couple of Bond films together, but I was trying to come up with a list of like the truly good ones. And I don’t think there are more than like five or six. Oh, is that bold? I was going to say that’s bold. I don’t know, I need to hear them first. Well, I think there are like a couple of the Connery ones, very good. I wouldn’t, I don’t think I could really say any of the Roger Moore ones are good. I like good by a different criteria. I think that’s the thing. I don’t think, what I mean by good is compared to other films that aren’t James Bond, I think James Bond is like a genre of its own. Oh, 100% is a genre of its own. Yeah. And there are enough of them that they can be judged and ranked in many interesting ways. Yeah. Whereas I would say that there’s probably a handful that I would say are great movies in and of themselves. Like Casino Royale would be one of those. Skyfall would be one of those. I think GoldenEye just about. Oh, I think GoldenEye is comfortably a great Bond film. Yeah, I’m being harsh there. I would say that probably the first adult ones, The Living Daylights is very good. What do you think? But what do you think overall? I think On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is amazing in some ways, then terrible in others, but it is a very celebrated entry these days. The weird thing about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is that he’s dubbed over by another actor for a large chunk of it under the guise that he’s going undercover, but you’re like, hmm. Yeah, I was like this all the time. Yeah, that to me feels like, I mean, that’s quite like a rushed fix for something. That’s the kind of decision-making that happens in games magazines a lot. I’ve got a lot of time for that. You’re like, yeah, I know what’s happening here. Yeah. Yeah. That’s impressive. I’m a big fan of Bond in general. Like I’ve watched them all since I was quite young. I’m very fond of all the eras. I even like Roger Moore. I think Spy Love Me is absolutely fantastic. That’s a fun film, yeah. Bit of blockbuster entertainment and like lots of iconic stuff. You know, I think everyone brings something to it. I’m such a Bond nut. I even did that when I was at university. I didn’t do a dissertation or anything like that or a thesis. I did a, we had to do like an extended essay which counted as one of our papers. And I did it on Bond adaptations. And I’d listen to the theme tune on Her Majesty’s Secret Service every hour on the hour to like spur myself on when I was writing it because it’s such a great piece of music. Yeah, but that theme is amazing. Do you mean the one that plays in the opening credits? Because there’s no song in that one, right? Yeah, da. When you’re trying to motivate yourself, that has got such a good build to it. And you’re like, whatever you’re doing seems 100% more badass until you get it back and it got a 2-2. And you can hear the variations of that theme in the game, sorry, in the film’s 19 ski chase sequences. It has, and there’s that really weird bit as well where he sort of sits in the kind of engine room of a chairlift for like half an hour feeling sad. It is odd, it is an odd film. It’s a weird film, that one. I think like Soderbergh wrote about it on his website saying it’s his favourite Bond film, but said that there’s about 20 minutes out in the middle, you should cut out, and he’s right. The bit where he’s doing the camp accent and he’s like the, I don’t know, he’s pretending to be that guy who’s- The sort of heritage expert. Yeah, but he’s got just going to Blofeld’s base and wearing a kilt or something. It was just a load of nonsense and there’s some really weird 60s sci-fi imagery in that one where those women just come awake when there’s like Jerry Anderson lights playing on the ceiling. It’s got big Avengers energy. Yeah, which obviously Diana Riggs in it. She’s very good and helps balance out Lazenby just being okay, I think. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I’m quite obsessed with that film. I’ve seen it five or six times. I think it was one of my breakup films at one point, which is very embarrassing. Really? Yeah, but I think Bond overall, like I’ve called on it a bit in recent years, just because I think that the conversation around it is quite tedious on social media and stuff. When any conversation about the best Bond I’ve got no time for now. And I just can’t be bothered. But I do quite like seeing these weird little consensus kind of appearing. Like people seem to like Tomorrow Never Dies now. Yeah, I quite like it. I think Jonathan Price is fun. I think people like the idea of like, you know, the heads of newspapers being like actual Bond villains, because I think that’s how people perceive a lot of our media barons. So there’s this sort of Rupert Murdoch figure. It’s got some fun stuff in it. It’s got a good theme tune as well. Yeah, I think my problem with any Bond film that has a character who’s not going to get his hands dirty is the main villain. They’ve just got like a big muscly guy standing next to them. Yeah, well, I think like that’s why, you know, Le Chiffre is such a good villain in Casino Royale because he’s just such a nasty character, whipping James Bond’s balls or whatever he does in that chair. But like, whereas I think like just printing like nefarious newspapers, is he on a submarine or something? He’s making the, he’s sort of manipulating events and causing disasters to then write the headlines. But like, you know, no offence to Jonathan Price, but in that film, I could beat the shit out of him. So he doesn’t come across as that intimidating a villain and likewise, I think Quantum of Solace, one of the big problems of that film is that Matthew Almirack’s stealing water or whatever. And like, again, like, it’s not intimidating. I just, I think Bond, great Bond villains have that mixture of being like a good, giving a good monologue, but then they’ll also get their hands dirty, you know. Yeah, there’s actually a lot of video game design in the idea of a weak man who, as long as you can kill his strong bodyguard, you can then kill him easily. That is how a lot, and it’s all, and it’s equally anti-climactic when it happens in video games, where you kill a big monster and then you just, the guy’s like sprawled back on some steps or something as you walk up to him and you’re like, no, okay. Yeah, because I feel like a lot of people who might have listened to me saying, James Bond, good or bad, have thought, well, this guy can go to hell. And, but I do fundamentally like James Bond, but like this, it’s a specific alchemy of things that make me actually think one of the films is good. And I think that, yeah, I don’t think you see it that consistently, it’s a weirdly inconsistent series, but yeah, certainly a good basis for a video game. So yeah, we wanted to talk a bit about the Bond games as well, because I think the good or bad conversation extends to that. What’s your kind of history with the Bond games, Matthew? Were you a big GoldenEye fan? Oh, well, of course, I mean, it kind of feels like you sort of have to be. I don’t know many Nintendo fans of my age who weren’t into GoldenEye. We were obsessed with it. All my friends at school were crazy into it. We liked Bond so much that on one of my friends, Mark Lucimo’s birthday at his house, he had an N64 with Bond. Someone else bought their N64 with Bond so that we could have it set up in the corner and just playing like the music, the holding music at the start of the game as the soundtrack for the rest of the party, which involved us playing James Bond on a different N64. We were that into GoldenEye. A lot of girls were at that party. No, just four mega-virgins. But we had a lot of Haribo. It was fantastic. I genuinely haven’t been to an adult party that is as good as that. And I wish adult parties were like that. But yeah, loved GoldenEye. In a way, I think it’s probably such a big, happy memory in my head that it’s kind of made it very, very difficult for anything to kind of come close in terms of Bond games, not general life experiences. My life’s not that sad. I was getting married and I was thinking, well, this just isn’t as good as facility. Because that would be mad. Of course, how about you? Were you a GoldenEye fan in the back? I always associate you in your past with PlayStation. Well, the thing is, right, my dad didn’t buy me an N64. He refused to on the basis that he said he could play all the good games on PC. And I was like, that is categorically not true with the N64, where there are like 10 or so, probably no more than about 15 amazing games on N64. But the ones that were good were so good and so replayable that they were the games I kind of always like lusted after when I was like 10 or 11. But like you, I knew loads of kids who had N64s. So much so that N64 and GoldenEye were so pervasive that I was quite surprised to learn just how behind Nintendo were in that generation because to me it seemed like every kid had that game and that console. I was quite surprised to learn that the N64 was not a high selling machine by any means. Yeah, like it’s weird, the nostalgia pieces whenever it’s an anniversary of PlayStation and they’re like PlayStation took over the culture. Like I think it must have taken over a slightly older cult, you know, it was the young adults as opposed to teenagers or at least that’s how it perceived to me. Like I could, I think I knew like one person with a PlayStation, I would have sworn GoldenEye was the biggest game on the planet, but. Yeah, yeah, I knew two people with PlayStations, I knew one person, one kid who played Metal Gear Solid when I was a kid, but everyone had played GoldenEye and everyone had played Super Mario 64 and everyone had played Ocarina of Time as well. These were like, these were pervasive like cultural touchstones for people of my age at that time. So no, I didn’t have it in 64, but I played loads of GoldenEye at other people’s houses and I played, I completed the campaign as well in GoldenEye like around someone’s house. I played the whole game, sampled the cheats and all that stuff. But I definitely was chasing GoldenEye a bit when I got a PS2 and I played pretty much every Bond game, right, trying to get, find that experience again. And it just didn’t happen because EA, I think, famously just didn’t do a great job with the license. They made, there’s some interesting bits to their games. I would say that like the vehicle sections in the PS2 Bond games are pretty good. Because that was kind of EA’s bread and butter, I guess. But they were like a weird mix of, were they mostly original Bond stories? Did they do any film adaptations? I know there was, The World Is Not Enough was a PlayStation 1 game. Yeah, Tomorrow Never Dies, they did too. That’s a terrible game, third-person shooter on PS1. Oh, no, sorry, yeah, The World Is Not Enough was on N64. That’s it, Tomorrow Never Dies was on PS1. The World Is Not Enough was not very good on N64. And to this day, because they abbreviated it as Twine, when anyone talks about Twine games online, I always think The World Is Not Enough every single time. I played Tomorrow Never Dies, I didn’t play Twine. I did play Agent Under Fire and Nightfire, which were both very average first-person shooters. And there was just a weird specific magic to GoldenEye where they replicated and extrapolated on parts of the film to build these very iconic first-person shooter levels that when you watch the film now, it’s almost the prism of the game, isn’t it? Yeah, and you remember scenes that don’t happen in the film because of the game. You’re like, oh man, this is going to be the shootout on the, wait a second, there weren’t any hostages on this boat. What’s going on? Yeah, the facility sequence is so brief. There’s no meeting Dr. Doke or any of that stuff. It’s just like, they get in and they set the charges. And then Orimov is suddenly there. And then like the explosion, you know, there’s a bit of interplay between Sean Bean and Pierce Brosnan. And then the facility blows up. It’s a phenomenal sequence, but… Bond doesn’t spend 10 minutes looking for a bloke called Dr. Doke, that’s for sure. Yeah. So, yeah, the game, I really like when I see people talk about the film and they can’t help but talk about the game because that, there’s almost no other examples of that where the game end up becoming a bigger deal other than maybe The Chronicles of Riddick. So, yeah, I mean, did you play any of those other Bond games after GoldenEye? Yeah, I felt like a rentals here and there because they were all very one and done. I sort of remember the EA era being, they all felt a little bit like a James Bond reskin of like early Medal of Honor games. Yeah. They all felt very like, they were sort of cinematic shooters, which GoldenEye actually isn’t, like GoldenEye is like weirdly open in certain ways. You know, it’s almost like a slight precursor to some of those sort of immersive sims in terms of like you had a space, you had a load of weapons, you could sort of snipe everyone out quietly or you could just turn it into a bloodbath. You know, there were levels where it felt like they were like big loops and you could kind of do them in different ways or different routes. That’s why I replayed GoldenEye where I don’t think you could say that about any of the, you know, Agent Under Fire or Nightfire. They were very like Call of Duty, kind of what Call of Duty is now, those very like linear kind of tickly set pieces off as it goes through. Yeah. Some of those GoldenEye levels felt like horror levels as well because of the music and the setting. It was strange. Some of the surface levels, the fact that you could do a big chunk of the game twice is quite odd as well. Yeah. So yeah, like the surface level, the first one where you’re looking for those radar towers, someone like had made an itch game that was that level except monsters start appearing and flashing in and out. That would really shit me up because the music was quite scary for the time. But yeah, you’re right, there was just a kind of like flavorless mush, the Agent Under Fire and Nightfire game. What was that? They made that weird one, which was like, I think it was third person or it went into third person. Yep. That’s Everything or Nothing. That was the one where they got Brosnan to do the voice as well as like a load. I think Willem Dafoe is the villain in it, like it’s a proper original Bond story, but the game feels very low budget. You kind of do the same driving section like four or five times and the levels are pretty boring. I don’t think I didn’t finish it, but I got pretty far. But at the time, it probably seemed like a big deal that Brosnan was in the game. Yeah, they started throwing their money about a bit and it’s like, oh, well, this is kind of an unofficial new Bond film because it’s got a singer in it will do a song and it’s got Brosnan. And then they did that weird thing where they got, didn’t they get Sean Connery out of retirement to voice from Russia with Love? Yeah, so that was probably the boldest, weirdest one they did. I did play a lot of Nightfire’s multiplayer, actually, with a friend of mine, because we basically put the bots on, which obviously GoldenEye didn’t have bots, but PerfectDart did. And we would just mainline the bots hundreds of times. And the competition would be who could kill the most bots. That’s what bots are for. Yeah, and that’s what you do when you have nothing but spare time on your hands in your teenage years, which we did, at a lot of times. So, yeah, but I don’t think I ever really loved it. I think the closest I got to really liking another Bond game was the weird Game Boy Zelda game. Do you play that game? Yeah, I played it back in the day. It’s not bad. No, it’s not. No, it’s weird. At the time, I just played it and consumed it as a weird little Bond thing. But now when I look back on it, I see that it is kind of a weird Zelda clone that sort of passed me by almost. I didn’t make that connection back then. Yeah, and had a really good Blackjack minigame built into it. You could just play Blackjack if you didn’t fancy playing Bond. I think you typed in B Jack as your name in the menu screen, and you just got to play the Blackjack game, which was quite cool. I like the idea of an old history where Bond just foregoes being a spy and he’s just absorbed endlessly into Blackjack while the world burns. And isn’t called James Bond, but is in fact called B Jack. If you’re playing Blackjack against someone called B Jack, you’d know you’re in trouble. You wouldn’t sit at that table. So yeah, there were those. And then later on Activision got the license, and two I think colossally disappointing Bond games, which felt like they had so much potential at the time. I remember there being these very beautiful edge covers for the two games, but 007 Bloodstone and the GoldenEye remake for Wii. I think Bloodstone obviously has Daniel Craig in it, and so does GoldenEye, weirdly. Which feels like they kind of like someone put a clause in the contract that you couldn’t get out of to me. But really don’t feel like Craig films. I completely missed the tone of what I perceived to be the tone of those films. Like the kind of like slightly grittier, realistic feel. The guy they got to write it, I think, was one of the Brosnan-era writers, and it does feel like a very trad Brosnan-esque story which completely misses that texture of what Daniel Craig brings to the character. Which is mainly thumping people in toilets, I think. Yeah, it is. And just monologuing a bit in quite a sort of like stern way. And just, I don’t know, just the kind of good set pieces and stuff. It just wasn’t, the same magic wasn’t really there. Did you play these games? Um, I didn’t play Bloodstone. I played the GoldenEye remake, which I don’t really rate. I just think it’s bizarre to try and crowbar Daniel Craig into like another Bond story. Like it just, it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Yeah, got good reviews at the time though, weirdly. Yeah, I think, well, if you listen to our review episode last week, you’ll know that there was a bit of a thirst for any wee, any company that showed wee like a modicum of love. And admittedly, it was like exclusive and quite shiny, but it also turned GoldenEye into quite a boring Call of Duty, like linear shooter. It just didn’t understand what made GoldenEye good at all, I don’t think. Yeah, well, it became really obvious when the game came to PS3 and Xbox 360 where it’s like next to Call of Duty, you see, oh no, these are just bad versions of this game, which was the same for the Quantum of Solace tie-in that Treyarch made in 2008. I don’t know if you played that, but yeah. Yeah, again, just quite cool how they did the different switching between first and third person. I think that worked all right, but it was just very boring and quite short first person shooter. There’s the really infamous one is the 007 Legends. The low scoring one. Which was made up of like famous scenes from previous, you know, older Bond films. It was almost like a game adaptation of like several other Bond films, which I actually haven’t played, but the joke I was here about is a game that like misjudges it so much. And there’s a scene in it where someone asked what Bond’s name is, and he turns around and says, James Bond. I don’t know if that’s true, but God, I hope it is. I think that was, I think Will Porter mentioned that in his Eurogamer review. That’s where I remember that from. Yeah, that was wild. I think there was one as well, which had GoldenEye in the name, maybe GoldenEye Rogue Agent. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that one. And it was called GoldenEye because he literally had a golden eye. Yeah, what a cheeky, I mean, I think that got really slated at the time, I think. Yeah. Midnaughty’s EA game. Oh man, yeah, I completely forgot about that one, yeah. Obviously, everything was living in the shadow of GoldenEye, but all of them… I wonder if any of them actually outsold GoldenEye. One of them must have, surely. I don’t know. I think that it was like one of the three best-selling games on the N64. I think, pretty much, if you had an N64, you bought GoldenEye. So, all of the early EA ones, they were pretty successful. They were just like right-time PS2 games. People wanted Bond games at the time. GoldenEye had created unrealistic expectations, which I think probably led to a halo effect to all these games selling well. But it’s a real shame that whatever happened, just Nintendo didn’t hold onto the license. I mean, it was so weird that that game even happened to begin with, really. All games since so far have just been living in GoldenEye’s shadow, and that seemed like it was never going to change, and Bond games kind of went away after Legends because no one had really cracked it. And who knows? I’ve no idea what the license holders thought of those games, or if they even cared. But nonetheless, here we are years later, and Bond is in the hands of IO Interactive, the makers of Hitman, and the last two Hitman games, and the upcoming third one I’m sure will be very good as well. Those last two games were phenomenally good. Sandbox, like assassination games basically, with a mixture of stealth and kind of like role play, and all of this different cool player choice stuff. Let’s talk about it, Matthew. IO Interactive versus Bond. What’s the, you know, what era of Bond do you think IO are the best fit for, and what will they bring to that type of game? It’s an interesting one, because like, you know, the… What IO do brilliantly, and I think what is the most obvious natural fit for Bond, is their like eye for like cinematic level design. They take global destinations, it’s a big globe, you know, trotting adventure, which Bond is, but they take places and they sort of distill them down to like their absolute like cinematic core. Like I wouldn’t say when you play any of that, particularly Hitman 1 and 2 is mainly what I’m thinking of. When you play their levels, I don’t think you necessarily think, wow, I’m in that place. You think, oh, this is such a, you know, it’s such a cool, rich version of this place. Yeah, great set dressing, you know. Yeah, that’s the thing. They always feel like really elaborate sets, which I like. There’s this real sort of cinematic vibe, not in terms of like, oh, it’s full of cut scenes and all that stuff. Just, just how they view the world. Like, I think they, they are clearly influenced by broad kind of filmic takes and that, that is very Bond to me. And also like very classy, very like, I’d say almost like, so I probably like the, if I was to pin an ear on it, I’d say like the Sam Mendes Bond films where they’re just sort of beautiful, everything’s beautifully composed, even though it’s a world you’re walking through. Deakins-y colours. Yeah, very, yeah. They’ve got that kind of richness to it. I am interested in where they go tonally with this because, you know, in terms of like if they’re going to try and ride the Daniel Craig success train, you know, even though it’s an origin story, which would imply it’s not going to be Daniel Craig or it’s not going to be a Bond we know, you know, it’s going to be something else, but it’s whether they kind of carry on with that tone. Like I don’t think they’ll go camp with it. No, no, I don’t think so. No, I think like you might see a bit of a few campy elements sneak in there. I think like what the potential of it to me is that it basically becomes the Bond film you want it to be. So let’s assume that not every mission is going to be an assassination because it won’t be, right? Like, yeah, there’ll be different types of things that you’re doing, like stealing information like you can you can really see, though, how like those big Bond scenes like the poker table in Casino Royale might factor into an IO Interactive level, you know, like you sneak something into someone’s drink while you’re playing cards at the table or whatever. Yeah. I can see how some bits of the Bond world work with them, IO, but other parts are kind of a mystery. And whether it becomes a kind of sandboxy game or not, I’m not sure. Like, I can see it having elements of that, but not necessarily being what the game is. Yeah, it’s weird. I think the stuff IO do well are the things I like most about Bond. Like, I like infiltration. I like low-key Bond. I like Bond when he just sort of saunters in to the kind of behind the scenes area and does some sort of spy work. I’m less into Bond when it becomes an all-out action thing, which he rarely does. Maybe like one set piece of film, you know, he’ll kind of really kick things off and, you know, drive a tank through Moscow, say Petersburg. And, you know, and interestingly, like the stuff I don’t like in Bond, I would say, is also the stuff I don’t think IO are as good at in terms of like big action, or at least not in the Hitman games. You know, when Hitman game becomes an action game, it’s at its least satisfying for me. Whether they like lean into that, I don’t know. I would imagine for a kind of mainstream audience, a Bond game would probably have to tick a few boxes that IO aren’t used to ticking. Car chasers. Car chasers, definitely. I mean, like, you know, that I know, will they do vehicle sections? That’s always been the thing where Bond games have come unstuck, I feel, because they’ve… You’ve had studios which have been like racing studios who’ve then made bad shooting bits in between. And then you’ve had shooter studios who’ve made bad racing bits. You know, sometimes you have the old, we got our friends at Criterion to design the cars for us or whatever, and you’re like, okay. I don’t think IO can do that, and there’s nothing in their back catalogue that kind of points to that kind of stuff. I wonder if they might just do like a couple of those to kind of pace break between levels or something like that. But then that is a problem that all of these Bond games have faced is they’ve never woven those together that well. And the cars are a part of Bond, that’s the thing. But then so too are the gadgets. And the gadgets is obviously where you can see the crossover between Hitman and Bond very, very strongly. I mean, you can just think about the pen that explodes in GoldenEye as being a thing that Agent 47 would have to kind of give someone as they’re writing and then to be used as a method of assassination. But again, not all the levels are going to be assassination levels because Bond doesn’t necessarily do that all the time. But I suppose it’s just where you see enough crossover in the DNA of the games and what a Bond game adaptation could be that you think there’s no way it can be a disaster, right? It can only be a good thing. Yeah, I think so. I honestly think they’ve kind of made the best Bond game since GoldenEye anyway. And I think Hitman 1 and 2 are that. I think Sapienza is a Bond level in that it begins in that town, it begins up top and you basically end in a secret lab under the island, if anything, there it’s out of place and it may be jazzed with the Hitman, what you expect from a Hitman game because he’s there trying to destroy a virus and you’re like, is this really Agent 47’s deal? But if that was just Bond, that would be absolutely no problem. Infiltrate this base, destroy a virus, that is classic stuff. It just feels like they’ve been auditioning for Bond with Hitman 1 and 2. Now this deal has come to light, you look at it and you think, so much of this, I mean, Paris in Hitman 1, that’s just Bond. He walks in the front doors brazen as you like in his tuxedo and he’s there to do some notorious, nefarious things. That’s so Bond. I almost think the struggle for them is going to be differentiating it from what they’ve done. It’s like, how do you make a Bond game when you’ve already, you can’t just repeat yourself, but you’ve sort of nailed it. Yeah, I guess the character has to become more a defined Bond character and less the kind of blank slate Agent 47 that you’re used to. Yeah. But I agree with you, Paris is another good example of a really good, basically a Bond level as it is. And I would also say that that Isle of Segeil, is it, from Hitman 2? Oh, the castle at the end. That is so like Bond. Yeah. Just people wearing masks and stuff, right? And then kind of weird rituals and you pull up in a boat and pull off the mission. That’s very Bond-like. That is a very kind of Eyes Wide Shut sort of level. That whole thing felt like something I could totally see in my mind’s eye in like a Daniel Craig Bond film. I thought that a lot about the first one. Is it Hawke Beach, Hawke Island? The first level in Hitman 2. As in the tutorial level? Yeah, is it like a New Zealand beach? I think it’s Hawke Bay, maybe? Yeah, when you go to Hawke’s Bay, you go to the house. That really reminds me of the opening of Casino Royale where he goes to that shady office and he’s talking about the hits he’s done. It’s a very low-key sort of Bond-as-assassin because that’s kind of what they were trying to do with the Daniel Craig bonds, weren’t they? They were trying to remind you that fundamentally he’s like a professional killer for the government and he’s a hitman or a monk. I can’t remember the line, something about him being a monk who is also a hitman. It’s better than that. It’s cool. What they say in the film is cool. He’s like, you’re like a monk, but you’re also like a hitman. That’s interesting. But that to me, that feels very like Daniel Craig Bond. One thing that gives me slight pause, I don’t know if you agree with me on this, is that I’m not wild about the actual cutscenes and storytelling in between missions in Hitman 1 and 2. Oh no, it’s terrible. I mean, I don’t really care. No, that’s the thing. In Hitman, it isn’t important. I think that kind of does have to work probably in a Bond film. A Bond game, sorry. I think what helps is that the in-game narratives are excellent. The ones where you follow a path and you give people an ironic punishment. The dialogue is very well written and they’re very funny, darkly comedic scenarios that you manipulate. So the wider story in Hitman is boring and does nothing for me, but the in-mission stories are fantastic. Yeah, they are. You’re right. Yeah. So I wonder if you can see it as you pick how you’re going to infiltrate, but then Bond really gets into it. Yeah, I guess I will have to go and be a model on this runway. He’s kind of wry about it. I could sort of see that working where it’s more like, what’s the Bondness of me assuming the role in this scenario? That’s where I kind of see it being almost like a kind of contemporary kind of Roger Moore take, rather than a very gritty like Daniel Craig take. Maybe that’s it. Maybe in every level there are actions you can do, which it defines as like these are the six bonds, sort of archetypal bonds. Oh, that would be so good. So you get to the end and it’s like, you just did the violent Timothy Dalton run, or you get to the end and you’re very suave like Sean Connery, or it’s like that was naff like Roger Moore. Or you ended in a ski chase and that’s George Lazenby. Yeah, every level, no matter where it is in the world. It could be the top of a skyscraper in Tokyo, somehow ends with a ski chase. It’s like, yep, yeah, Lazenby did it. Yeah, I really like that idea. That’s a great idea. I hope they do that. One thing I was interested to hear your take on was whether you think, we have this dream vision, obviously, of them kind of doing the sandbox thing. Whether you think that’s too complicated or niche from maybe what a mainstream bond has to be. I’m basically curious, do you think they’re going to have to dumb down Hitman or what they’ve been doing in Hitman to make this work for presumably what they’re going to hope is a wider audience? Well, I feel like they’ll have to make changes. I really hope that the Hitman level structure is something they find a way to make work. Because if you pad those out with third-person shooter levels where he has to own a raider facility or something, that’s like, I see that being bad. But you kind of hope that if it’s a James Bond origin story, it could take place over a long period of time, and therefore the story can zone in on these key moments in his career as he becomes a secret agent. And I wonder if the difficulty settings just become calibrated to if you’re the big Bond movie fan, select this difficulty setting. If you’re a Hitman fan, select this difficulty setting. That’s what I kind of hope they’ll go for, but hard to tell. I feel like they have been wrestling with that question in Hitman 1 and 2, with the guided opportunities, which some people are just like, no, not interested, turn them off. But even other people are like, even that is still too kind of obscure for them to actually play. I feel Hitman is a game you bring a lot of experience with previous Hitman games as to just what you’re meant to be doing in it. Maybe that will work here too, just because everyone knows fundamentally what Bond is about and how Bond is meant to behave. So maybe that ticks that box for them. I’m definitely curious to see if going mainstream, which I think this is, is going to have a big impact on them. Definitely, I can’t see it being as mean as Hitman. Yeah, Hitman is in a corner a bit of being… The people who love it really love it, but it doesn’t really have mainstream appeal. This has to have mainstream appeal, so obviously something probably has to change in the process. But at the same time, I can’t see them going too far away from what they’re good at. The reason they seem like a slam dunk is because they led with the fact that IO is making this. And what does that tell you? It doesn’t tell you that they’re going to make Kane and Lynch but with Bond. It tells you they’re going to make Hitman with Bond, because Hitman is their bread and butter and has been for the last five, six, seven years. So there has to be a way in for those people. So yeah, like you say, being as mean as it is, probably not. But then maybe the kind of different ways in which the game would kind of rates your performance are where the kind of Hitman nuance comes into it. Dalton’s mean, he’s mean Bond. Dalton, there’s not loads in it between Dalton and Craig’s Bond really. I feel like they both resort to the same kind of like methods, you know. One of the Dalton, I think, isn’t the second Dalton film is the only one which is like a 15 or an 18. Because his mate gets half eaten by sharks. And he explodes someone in a depressurized tank. And he sets fire to… I don’t think it’s him. It’s the main guy he sets fire to. The dude from Showgirls. I can’t remember his name now. That guy. He was like a villain in Everything in the 80s. I’m completely blanking on his name now. So yeah, I can kind of, I can see how they can bring those different Bond bits into it. Like you could have Ry Bond and you could have Sirius Bond. You could have, I’ll torture this guy to get the information. Like yeah, you can see this Bond getting his bollocks beaten off with a piece of rope. Other than Hitman, like the thing I thought of is like a really good Secret Agent Bond-y level in something was the Dishonored level where you go to Lady Boyle’s last party and you have to suss out who the relevant sister is and then either assassinate her or whatever. But it’s very James Bond-y because you go in in sort of disguise basically. You’re not meant to be there. And then you are. There’s all these different ways the mission can play out. And that’s quite James Bond-y, I think, as well. I’m curious if you think that we could come up with a few potential Bond levels based on, you know, the Hitman series. Like what could you see as being a really a good kind of like a Bond level made by IO Interactive? I would say that a kind of going to a casino would be a really good and obvious like first point of like, okay, your target is in this casino. Either you have to get information or kill the target, but you can fundamentally turn up in a tuck and you can sit at the tables and James Bond things can happen. You know? Yeah, that’s a good one. I think I know, and literally they do this quite a bit in Hitman. I think things where people have big social events or big conferences in their corporate headquarters, which then allow you to gain access to the secret bit of the corporate headquarters, I think that happens in Tomorrow Never Dies quite a bit. He goes to the Newspaper Man’s party and then breaks into the newspaper facility. To me, and this again, this is why IO is such a classic match, a lot of classic Bond scenes are about locations which are social and elite, and then it reveals a second half to it. There’s an awful lot of that at play in Hitman 1 and 2, of each level is roughly two spaces, one where you’re welcome and one where you’re not, and that’s why that works. I’ve always really wanted to see IO do a… and this isn’t just leading up to a George Lazenby bit. I’ve always wanted them to do a ski resort with a chairlift, where you have two buildings which are split and you can travel, but on the slope or in the chairlift. I went to a relatively fancy ski resort for a wedding, and I was in the ski lift, and I was thinking in a Hitman game, like assassinating someone in the cable car going past you would be so cool. And also it would let you ski out of the level like George Lazenby. Yeah, and also I think Spectre has some ski bits, icy resort bits where that Lea Sidoux character is working and stuff. I can kind of see that. What about, again, a sort of stolen from a couple of Bond films, but also an older Hitman game, like a theater of some kind or like an opera house. I love that. It’s my favorite bit in Quantum of Solace actually, is when he goes to the opera and then he kind of reveals the conspirators and they all leave and he sort of spies them all and kind of rounds them up. But Hitman have done, you know, they did the opera house level in Blood Money quite famously. That feels like a good location with lots of people, you know, glamour, but also like a secret backstage and the theatricality of it plays well with kind of both Hitman and Bond. I could also see an airport being a good venue for a Bond level. Yeah, like you got quite a lot of airporty stuff in Casino Royale, but the reason I thought this was watching the film Tenet. There is a sequence where, you know, spoiler alert, if you’re not seen the film, it’s a mild spoiler really. The two main characters, the protagonist and Neil, they pretend to be art collectors and go into this art facility within an airport called a freehold, very important to that film’s plot, weirdly, a thing I’ve never heard of. And they pretend to be art collectors and then they set off this kind of like alarm system and are basically there for something else. And that made me think, oh, an airport is quite a good space for this. Like if someone’s on a private jet, you can be like the, you know, the Bond could be like the pilot who turns up and then just shoots the guy while the plane’s taking off. And that could be quite fun. And going into like lounges, pretending to be someone else and being a security guard, you know, like taking someone for questioning and then like torching them for information. You’ve got like all types of characters in an airport as well. Like everyone is there. And the potential for really kind of lavish sort of settings as well. Like, because, you know, you can basically have like a first class lounge that looks more like, it’s like a whole other space where it’s a bit fancier and isn’t just like the kind of like windows and sort of grey shop fronts of a regular airport. I could see something like that working quite well. What about if he broke into his own or had, you know, some reason to explore or break into his own headquarters? Oh, MI5, that would be a good one. Yeah, something I’ve always, if they ever put me in charge of Bond, which they would never do, if they let me make a Bond film, my dream location for a Bond fight is Q’s lab, where, like, everyone’s grabbing just random shit and you don’t really know what it is, because everything looks like one thing, but it’s actually another thing, really. You could have real fun with something like that in a Hitman game. You know, you just go into a room and it’s like, it’s just full of, like, glasses and pens and steering wheels, but they’re all secretly other things, which you can kill people with, and you can just have a great old time. That is a fantastic idea for a level, actually, yeah. And, like, the guy is sort of, um, the guy’s like a Russian agent or something, who’s actually masquerading as someone else for a meeting at MI5 Hot Puppets. Yeah. And then, yeah, like, it kind of… Kill the mole. Kill the mole in MI5. Yeah, and you can have escalations in that, where, like, suddenly there, loads of people who are inside MI5 turn out to be working with this guy, and turn their guns on you, and the whole ambience of the place changes. Oh, that’d be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can really see those types of venues becoming good bond spaces. I also think about the opening of Spectre, where you’re at a parade. Oh, yeah. That’s a great IO, you know, they’ve got the people tech. Yeah, I think that works really well, potentially. That whole sequence is quite video gamey anyway, I think. And in another way, it’s quite bad film. But, yeah, I think that, yeah, when you start to connect, the reason people are so pumped about this news is when you connect the dots, it works really, really well. Yeah. Anything else that you think would work well? You know, I want them to come up with lots of exciting things. I would like to see, I mean, it’s not very Daniel Craig, I must admit, but I’d like to see one ridiculous villain layer, kind of a layer that is, it goes back to the old Bond tradition of there’s a load of baddies living inside something that looks okay, like a volcano or a big, there’s a boat and it’s actually full of submarines, or I like, Bond does a good line in things inside other things. I wouldn’t mind that. What the other thing is, I don’t know, but something, yeah, something big with a weird base inside. Yeah, the thing I think they have to avoid is like being off-brand Bond. Like, if they’re going to do an origin story, that presumably means you have none of the actors playing the part. So when in the casting, you have to be very careful, I think, to get someone who feels like they could be a good Bond character, even though they’re not the real thing. Tricky thing to pull off, you know. Absolutely, but they can do it. They’re the ones. Yeah, I believe in. It. Last subject then, I wanted to talk about games that we think are good spy games already. Following on from GoldenEye, I thought Perfect Dark was a really obvious example of like, quite a James Bond-y game, even it’s a bit more of a cyber thriller kind of feel to it. Yeah, definitely more sci-fi, but I think it’s got the same like, love of gadgets. I love all the alternate secondary fire modes on all the guns. That feels quite kind of Q-like. And you get to walk around the Carrington Institute, which is very like MI5. That’s fun. Yeah, and obviously exists because they wanted to make a sequel, but couldn’t with the Bond license. So, yeah, they kind of went in off all of these tangents, which I think shows you some real imagination. What else do you think kind of works as a good Bond-esque? It’s tricky, like there aren’t many games which nail it, because I think most people kind of they either go full stealth, which loses some of the charisma of Bond or Spies, or they go outright action, which also doesn’t feel very spyish to me. I put down Deus Ex Human Revolution, which I think definitely more so than the original two. Adam Jensen feels like he can be a bit more of a Bond figure in that there are social interactions. Some of his upgrades take him into sort of like, you know, spraying weird pheromones or whatever to make people let him into bars and stuff. There is a more social side to him, along with him being very capable action and the fact that he spies. I mean, the setting is not Bond at all. It’s just all too bleak. You know, I think Bond is fundamentally or spies are fundamentally like a, you know, a bit more of a hopeful thing. There’s a bit too grim and unhappy. But I think that’s a reasonably good like it takes a lot of boxes of like spy activities. Yeah, I think so. The kind of gadgety side of it comes into it with you hacking different terminals and stuff like that to like take control of turrets or security cameras. And yeah, you know, you hack into computers to read people’s messages. That’s quite bondy as well. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. There’s also there’s like a expansion for the second game in that sub series where you are breaking into a prison. Basically it’s like you’re a fake prisoner. And that’s not that bondy, I guess. But you are pretending to be someone else in order to solve this one problem. Okay. And that’s got I think that’s got potential as a kind of a reminds me a bit of that Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol where he starts and he’s in prison, Ethan Hunt. Oh, yeah. Like that’s I think there’s something slightly secret agent about that Metal Gear Solid 3 is very much built in the image of like it’s got kind of riffs on Sean Connery Bond films, even though I don’t think it’s very James Bond in and of itself, despite the fact that you’ve got these kind of figures who fulfill the kind of Q and M roles. Yeah, actually ends up being a lot weightier. Plus it’s about an American character. And it’s very much about America and the Russian war, sorry, the Cold War. And obviously that kind of factors into the Bond films. But it’s fundamentally it’s about a declining empire, basically James Bond, isn’t it? Kojima definitely likes Bond. Doesn’t he always have like an unlockable tuxedo? Aren’t there unlockable tuxedos in some of them? I thought he meant in real life. I thought like what, like a box he just pulls out when he’s in a restaurant or something. If he’s been really good, he unlocks his tuxedo. Yeah, you can certainly wear one in Metal Gear Solid 3 and 2. Probably one. I can’t really remember. And in 4, actually, I think you’re wearing one in a whole sequence in the game. I’ve popped down Spy Party as well, which is the sort of the weird multiplayer game where one person’s trying to do spy stuff at a party and the other person is a sniper trying to take them out. And it’s fantastic. It’s not the full spy experience, but I would say that it captures that moment in the spy film. It captures two key moments, which is trying to pick someone out from the crowd. It’s a great sniper game and something that I’d be interested to see if they did any sniping stuff in the IO Bond, given that sniping was so key in the Hitman 2 bonus mode. But the person at the party, they’re trying to blend in and not reveal themselves to this sniper that they can’t see. There’s a really good tension there. I’d like to see someone try to capture some of that drama in a single player campaign. Whether it can be done, I don’t know, but that’s good. I rate that. Yeah, that’s a good example of something quite Bond-y, but specific in one game. Alpha Protocol, the Obsidian RPG. I’ve never actually played this. I don’t really love it. I know it’s revered as another cult classic, 7 out of 10 sort of game. I found it a bit too flavorless in its art direction, and it’s the way your character looks even though you’re playing a custom… Are you playing a custom character? I don’t really remember now. Yeah, I think you do make a spy in it. Yeah, your character is called Michael Thornton, and I think you adjust the character’s appearance. But either way, even though the writing was good, I just don’t think it looked or played well enough personally, and obviously it was a bit of a flop, but people really love it now and it’s probably a good touchstone for the types of levels you can do in a Bond game. No One Lives Forever kind of riffing. Old school Bond. That’s like 60s. Yeah, it’s kind of more like in that Austin Powers vein. It kind of appeared at around the same time. That should come back that series. Yeah, I think it’s stuck in permanent. Wright’s Limbo, isn’t it? The second one is fantastic. Really good. Yeah, both by Monolith. Obviously very accomplished first person shooter developer that would later make Fear. Sid Meier’s Covert Action, a game I’ve not played but quite a well liked PC cult classic that I bought on Steam for £1.49 in the Steam sale just before we recorded this podcast. Ka-ching, says Sid Meier. Enjoy your 79p cutter, whatever it is. Yeah, those are actually all the ones I could think of. There aren’t that many. I did struggle. In my head, everything was spy, spy, spy, but there aren’t many. Weren’t Rockstar meant to be making a spy game? Yeah, it was called Agent. It was meant to be made by Rockstar North and it was meant to be a PS3 exclusive. It just sort of vanished and never really became anything. But I think there was some leaked concept art that made it look quite bondy. I think there were Russian locations that leaked or something like that. But I would have played the shit out of it. I mean, HD era Rockstar, like Red Dead, LA. Noire era Rockstar game about spies. I would have loved that game. Yeah, I could really see it working. But yeah, wasn’t to be sadly. So yeah, it’s all on you IO Interactive. Oh, IO, you can do it. Nobody can do it. No, nobody does it better. Hopefully. Very good. Yes. I really just think this is like a marriage made in heaven. I just really hope it pays off for them and it’s a good experience and it’s successful for them and that they can keep doing their thing. So really one of the best developers around and yeah. If you’ve not played Hitman, then you’re listening to this obviously like those first two games, you can get them dirt cheap now. They are two of the most addictive, fun and replayable games around right now. Absolutely. Such a class act. The third one, you just know it will be good. Yeah, it’s like it’s a dead set. Okay, great. Well, that’s our podcast on James Bond, Matthew, unless you have any more thoughts you want to add. No, I’ve got nothing to add. I’m bonded out. Yeah, I’m sure we’ll talk about this again down the line too. Maybe we can give our rankings of the five best Bond movies. That’s what people want. I’m sure that’s why people tune in to a video games podcast. But yeah, thank you very much for listening. If you like this episode, consider subscribing on the service of your choice. You can follow us at backpagepod on Twitter and email us your thoughts at backpagegames.gmail.com. We are also both on Twitter. So I’m Samuel W. Roberts, Matthew, your Mr. Basil underscore pesto. Yeah, and we’ll be back next week for a mystery episode that we haven’t decided the time of recording, but I’m sure will be extremely entertaining. Oh, of course. Thank you for listening. Thank you, bye bye.