Game Boy 007 – Bond

“Game Boy” is a weekly column in which I write about being a game developer working in Montreal. You’ll find them all under this category, and it starts here.

One of the things I do at work is produce a weekly newsletter for the team I’m in. It’s something I started doing for the team I joined after leaving For Honor, as part of an effort to improve communication inside the team and to bring everyone closer (you know, team building). After 42 weekly editions (ending it at that number may or may not have something to do with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), I thought I would hang my hat (in part due to a merging of teams, as well as changes to my role and responsibilities), but then I ended up starting a weekly “pirate” newsletter with a colleague (which I actually modelled after a VIC-20 aesthetic), and that seemed to be enjoyed just as much if not more than the old newsletter, and so we converted it to a new proper newsletter for this new team.

I have fun with these (it’s the reason I do it), and me and the two colleagues I do them with come up with themes each week, and they usually revolve around movies. A few weeks ago it was the 7th edition — since I number my newsletter like I number this column, it was in fact the “007” edition, and so you can imagine what we ended up doing with that one (I didn’t really leave my colleagues a choice).

And so this is where it ties into this edition of this column. For the newsletter, we did a bunch of fun Bond-related content, including my top (00)7 list of Bond films, and I wrote a little something about what I believe to be the best and hugely underrated Bond video game.

You ask anyone to name you a Bond game, and they’re likely to name GoldenEye. Whether its aged well or not, there’s no denying it was a groundbreaking game for the time — popularizing multiplayer FPS play on console, and with an insanely fun 4-way split-screen at that. But if you ask me what my favorite Bond game is, it’s James Bond 007: Blood Stone, which was released for the PS3 and Xbox 360 (I played it on the latter).

The studio behind the game was Bizarre Creations, better known for its racing game pedigree (Project Gotham Racing), and so as you can imagine, they injected an incredibly fun driving element to the game — and I’m already a big fan of driving cars in games, even outside of racing games (which probably explains why I like the Grand Theft Auto series so much). But on top of great driving levels, I loved that that they created a 3rd person action game instead of first-person — not only do I tend to prefer 3rd person action games, I’m also happier seeing Bond in action, rather than seeing things from his perspective.

I loved that game immensely, more than any Bond game that has come before or after (yes, even more than GoldenEye), and I do wish they would make another Bond game in that style. (I also think it would be interesting for Telltale to make a Bond game, in their adventure game style.)