Would have said that about the comics a few years ago, or to use a more apt point - I would DEFINITELY have said that about purchased IP video games in 2008, then in 09 Rocksteady gave us Arkham Asylum! It’d just need a game developer who has the right idea to bring it back.
If at all an original story would be the way to go. Sadly the industry creativity is largely concentrated on other, more profitable titles and franchises where there are no license fees eating into the earnings.
Absolutely an original story with room for sequels.
My second choice would be a film adaption. I could really get behind something like The Living Daylights, with Timothy Dalton providing his voice and likeness. Driving the Vantage, evading guards at Gibraltar, etc. It would be an exciting project.
That would be fantastic. It would probably leap right up to the front of the list of my favorite Bond game of all-time. Then again, aside from GoldenEye, that’s not exactly a difficult goal to reach.
Sadly, I have a better chance of being elected as Pope tomorrow than this kind of game would have of ever being mentioned as an idea in a pitch meeting.
Dalton would be the obvious choice for a film adaption, even though it’s delusional to expect it to ever happen, as you say. Connery and Brosnan have already had games with their voice and likeness. Roger is sadly no longer with us. Dalton is still relatively young and has had a strong reappraisal.
Getting new content for his Bond would excite many. And I’d like to think he’d be up for it.
Games are where my mind is at, right now. Release dates mean something as they’re actually made and not delayed. It’d make sense for the franchise to look at making games again given the demand for stay at home entertainment, but I just don’t see it happening anytime soon.
If it were up to me, I’d want to see a game with an original story that is set in its own continuity. The downfall of the Bond games were the result of being too closely tied to the movies and Call of Duty. Trying to ape the Craig films in video game form, turned the games into generic shooters. Then there was activision forcing them to be low-budget Call of Duty clones. The EA games worked because they weren’t trying to emulate the films. Agent Under Fire and Nightfire and both completely independent of the Brosnan films, and while Everything or Nothing is basically Brosnan’s fifth film, the craziness works in a game where it failed in Die Another Day.
I’d argue that Activision’s downfall with Bond was trying to make the Craig Bond fit the COD mold. Craig’s Bond is (despite those who scream Bourne) most similar to the The Dark Knight Trilogy where it’s words that carry the most weight.
I do agree with the CoDing of the Craig Bond. However, recall that TDK only ever saw one video game and that was the lackluster Batman Begins, but even TDK was very gadget-heavy. CraigBond is gadget light even in Spectre. The successful Batman games were the Batman: Arkham games which are much more closely aligned to Batman: The Animated Series than the Nolan films. It’s for this reason that I think not tying the games to the films would be the far better idea. Let a studio like Rocksteady create a cinematic adventure with high-production values and a Bond independent of any previous version. My ideal game would be a semi-open worldish adventure where Bond has a kind of MI6-like hub where he undertakes various missions around the world that advance the plot. The closest game that I can compare to that would be Splinter Cell Blacklist.
I can’t see a studio like Rocksteady taking on the Bond franchise. Between the license itself and then the fact that the most recent games have not sold well at all, it’s a risk/reward scenario for them, and any AAA developer, that trends far too much in the direction of risk. And that is as things currently stands. There’s been whispers that game prices in the next-generation will be headed up to $69.99 instead of the current $59.99, which will further complicate such matters.
The most logical viewpoint from here is that the Bond gaming franchise is dead. There’s also very little to suggest that it’s ever going to come back.
I think they pilfered equally from as many Batman stories as possible, but I agree with your base point - the best way to make a Bond game is to make an original game that cherry picks, magpie like, from all the different interpretations of the character.
There was a small, fleeting moment where I entertained the possibility that Rocksteady’s mystery game was a Bond game. However, there’s no way that anyone would spend upwards of 5 years creating a Bond game (007 Legends was reportedly produced in only 8 months and it definitely shows). Most likely, their new game is going to be Justice League. I’d unfortunately have to agree that the Bond game series is dead. The low sales of the Activision games do not justify the high-production costs and the likely relatively high cost paid to MGM for the Bond license. That being said, the low sales of the Activision Bond games are ENTIRELY Activision’s fault. The games, as stated above, except for Blood Stone were all cheap Call of Duty clones. They were never marketed very well. Blood Stone sold at most 200,000 copies, releasing on the same day as Goldeneye 2010 and only Goldeneye received any kind of advertising. Not to mention the fact that, to this day, I still don’t really understand what Blood Stone’s story is or even why it’s called Blood Stone (diamonds do not figure into the plot at all). Raven Software’s cancelled Bond game was to be a sequel and looked promising, but was cancelled due to Blood Stone’s poor sales (again, directly Activision’s fault). Both Bizarre Creations and Eurocom were closed as a result of the poor performances of the Bond games. So, with all of those factors, on top of not knowing what stake Activision still has in the Bond license, I would be hard-pressed to believe we’ll ever see another James Bond video game.
I myself would rather go the route of a classic Bond film being made into video game form. Let that nostalgia funny bond be tickled, all the while adding in some fun extras here and there.
For some reason, I always fancied a video game adaptation of The Man With the Golden Gun…
I wouldn’t mind a remaster effort for the likes of The World is Not Enough, either. Highly underrated, in my estimation.
