There are a lot of people out there who argue over who the best Bond is from the movies. What exactly does it take to be a good Bond in a video game?I actually think we have the perfect Bond with Daniel Craig. He's just a much more hands on Bond, a much more physical, more cunning, and more dangerous Bond than ever before. From a video game standpoint, that's awesome. That's great for us—he doesn't sit back and rely on a lot of gadgets as much and he's just much more aggressive and much more involved.
Do you think that James Bond's gadgets are a cop-out?I wouldn't say it's a cop-out so much as it's almost like a crutch you can lean on, and sometimes you can lean on it too much. If you go back to some of the old
Bond movies and some of the old
Bond games, it can be something that you lean on too much. We have a few gadgets in our game and it's a subtle touch, but it's not something that's overpowering. You don't come to each new level in our game with a new gadget to somehow save you from whatever bad guy you take on. It's a bit different from previous
Bond games where you'd get cufflinks and lasers and stuff. Yes, you almost become Superman in games like that. I don't think gamers like to become Superman because then there's no drama, there's no conflict, there's no concern. Unless someone pulls out kryptonite, you're not going to be harmed too much.
Daniel Craig obviously had input into his character. Did he have any input into the game at all?
He did actually. Not up front, because he was busy filming the movie while we were making the game, but he's a super nice guy. I got to show him the game in February for the very first time and he was actually a bit anxious about how he'd look in the game. He was never in a video game before and so I think he was worried about how we would portray him in the game. But once he saw it, got his hands on it, and was able to see how his character looked, he was real happy. He even asked me to leave the development kit with him for a few days so he could show his buddies. He had some different ideas, saying some of the images looked like old images, they needed to be updated, but where he really contributed the most was when we did the voice recordings of him. We had our own first-draft script where we said, "Okay, this is what James Bond would say in this situation, in this environment," and he was able to come in and say, "This looks good. This is okay. No, actually, Bond would say this here. Bond would say something else here." That just really helped us to make a better game, to make a better James Bond game.
Were there any specific quirks of Daniel Craig as Bond that were added in during development?Well, the biggest thing you'll recognize in our game, we have what you call a "take-down system." Daniel Craig is a much more physical Bond. We wanted to exemplify that in the game. So, Daniel Craig in
Casino Royale and also in the upcoming
Quantum of Solace, you'll see him do these physical takedowns where he stands up behind an enemy and takes him down or just goes for the takedown using hand to hand combat. That's the biggest thing that we added to the game that's much more specific to a Daniel Craig Bond than a Roger Moore Bond—Sean Connery, yes, but not so much a Roger Moore Bond or a Timothy Dalton Bond.
When someone picks up the game on Nov. 4 and plays through it, are they going to have some of the movie spoiled for them?Well, a lot of people have asked me that, but I kind of look at that as being something cool. You get a head start on seeing some of the elements of the movie. Our game actually covers
Casino Royale and
Quantum of Solace.
Quantum of Solace is the first true sequel in Bond movie history and so our game covers both stories. The scenes that we thought would be really cool action pieces for gamers to play, we took them from
Casino Royale and the script of
Quantum of Solace and created them in our game. So, while there are elements of
Quantum of Solace, like the long dialogues, that won't be in our game, the action from the movie will be in the game.
Did you feel any constraint working on this rather than working on a whole new project?I wouldn't call it constraint as much as I would call it opportunity. With a character like James Bond, you know James Bond. I know James Bond. You walk down the street and you say "Shaken, not stirred," nine out of ten people are going to say, "Oh yeah, James Bond. I know what you're talking about." There's such a rich history of the character. We don't have to explain all of that back-story. You can get right in and get players up and playing right away.
A lot of people believe Goldeneye was the best Bond game previously made. A lot of people especially liked the multiplayer component to that. What aspects of the singleplayer Quantum of Solace are you looking to carry over to the multiplayer? Yeah,
GoldenEye was definitely the best game in the
James Bond history of video games. It's more than just a
Bond game. We owe the RARE guys, the guys that made that game, a huge debt of gratitude, not just because we're making a
Bond game, but because we're making a first-person shooter also. Our multiplayer game modes, I tend to think of them in two ways. One, we wanted to build game modes that were really easily accessible: gamers were going to get into it and it wouldn't take four or five hours of gameplay to feel like you're going to be successful. And our engine is a hardcore first-person shooter engine, but we wanted to make it an easy game to get into because James Bond has so many fans that aren't necessarily hardcore gamers. We wanted it to be an easy game to get into from a multiplayer standpoint. So we have a couple other game modes that let you play as James Bond. It's called "Bond Versus". Basically, you play as Bond and there could be up to 11 other guys in this evil organization and you need to take them all down or you need to diffuse the bomb. Their goal is to blow up the environment that you're in. When you play as Bond, it is intense—you really have to be smart about how you take guys down and how you diffuse the bomb.
So, that all sounds good, but it this game better than GoldenEye?I'm definitely not going to sit here and say it's better than
GoldenEye. We got a guy who got into game development just because of how much he enjoyed GoldenEye. We're not here to say we're better than them—that's not what we're all about. Our goal was not to make a game better than
GoldenEye but to build a game that people think is worthy of the James Bond name and worthy of the James Bond character.
