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.