James Bond’s future is on shaky ground right now, and IO Interactive isn’t exactly putting fans at ease. Today, the developer released a trailer for their upcoming James Bond video game, 007 First Light. A third-person stealth action game in the vein of IO Interactive’s famed Hitman series, 007 First Light is an original prequel story that depicts a young James Bond on a dangerous mission that, should he complete it successfully, will earn him his 00 status. Developed while the James Bond rights were still held by EON Productions and the Broccoli family but now being released in cooperation with Amazon MGM Studios, the current rights holder, 007 First Light will be released on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC sometime in 2026. You can watch the 007 First Light trailer below:
The best they could come up with for a title was First Light? Does that sound Flemingesque to you? Even when EON stopped using Ian Fleming’s titles (for a while), they came up with ones that sounded like they could be Bond stories, and some of them had connections to Fleming: Goldeneye was the name of Fleming’s estate in Jamaica; The World is Not Enough was the motto on Bond’s family crest in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. First Light has no imagination, like they didn’t even try to make it in keeping with the traditional Bond titles. But, then, they’re not going for a traditional Bond with this game, as IO CEO Hakan Abrak told IGN, but an “original” Bond, albeit (he claims) with influence from the movies and books – although they don’t seem to mind retreading the evil 00 agent plot from Goldeneye. That’s why you’ve got so many “modern” flourishes in the 007 First Light trailer, like the M who recruits Bond into British Intelligence being an Indian woman instead of Sir Miles Messervy, the old admiral who was Fleming’s M, and the black woman escorting him through Q-Branch is clearly Moneypenny.
But Bond himself is the worst; he looks more like Peter Parker than James Bond, with a boyish energy rather than a masculine man’s. I know IO didn’t want him to look specifically like any of the Bond actors, and that’s fine – and in Daniel Craig’s case, preferable – but you can at least make him look something like he’s described in the books. (I know, he has the scar on his cheek from the novels; I guarantee this will be the same thing the Craig films always did, where they changed the character to a ridiculous extent, then put in a small flourish or reference so idiots could look it up on Wikipedia and tell the rest of us how it was the closest version to the books.) The 007 First Light trailer makes him look like any generic video game action hero; he never wears a suit or tux, and the action scenes are the same ones you’ve seen a million times, which isn’t necessarily bad, but, given what little we know, nothing special. And, of course, they’ve got Bond going rogue again because nobody who writes this character seems to understand him anymore. Even the voice doesn’t fit, and I don’t just mean James Bond; it doesn’t even seem to match the character design. Sure, it’s neat that they incorporated the theme from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service into the score, but so did one of the Craig films’ trailer. I’m not looking forward to this, and it’s making me even more worried about what Amazon will do to James Bond, despite them having little to do with the game’s development; in fact, to show you what a rock and a hard place Bond was caught between, EON was the one who signed off on 007 First Light. Bond fans are in for a long, bad time.
Let us know what you thought of the 007 First Light trailer in the comments!
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I think my favorite might be the briefcase in From Russia With Love, with the hidden rifle, knife, tear gas, and fifty gold sovereigns, all of which he found a reason to use.
Should have called it Young Bond. One reason I always liked Batman and Bond are the hidden tricky weapons. Boy scout lesson right there. Be prepared.