Hear me out: What if James Bond just shouldn’t be in videogames?

I played a good few hours of 007 First Light last week, and I encourage you to click that link and read all about what I thought of them. But my time with Jim Bond sparked other thoughts. Thoughts that probably don’t belong in a preview. Thoughts like: What if James Bond just shouldn’t be a videogame protagonist?

I know what you’re thinking, and first of all I’d like you to stop calling me those names. Second, yes, GoldenEye for the N64 is a classic. You’re also not really James Bond in it. You’re a hand with a pistol in it and, sometimes in cutscenes, Pierce Brosnan’s face. The character of Bond existed as a lore reason for your gun to emit bullets.

But games that try to make you feel like James Bond, that put you in his actual shoes and attempt to embody him as a character? They fall down.

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Admittedly, a lot of them are simply not very good videogames, but also: I think the very nature of Bond is that he is a creature of cinema. He just doesn’t quite fit into games.

Part of this is, well, he’s annoying. This might scan differently to non-Brits or, indeed, to anyone who doesn’t share my particular brand of class psychosis, but James Bond is an insufferable public school dickhead. He’s a rowing club Tory boy through and through, and he comports himself like a man who has a right to the Earth and everybody on it.

“Actually I think of myself more as politically homeless.” (Image credit: IO Interactive)

Which is quite fun for 90-to-120 minutes of a movie, where he is surrounded by numerous other people who can roll their eyes at him whenever he opens his mouth. In a videogame for 10, 20, 30, 40 hours? Less so, and especially less so in something like a First Light, where a lot of his cocky one-liners and general swagger are delivered to empty rooms and enemy corpses, where no one save the player can tell him to give it a damn rest.

But also, part of his charismatic arrogance is that he is suave and unflappable. Well, great. Good for him. I am not suave, and I flap at the slightest inconvenience. I simply don’t… fit into him? Should probably reword that. Whenever I, as Bond, fumble a counter, miss a shot, or try to duck into cover only to fling myself headfirst into a desk lamp, I break the entire spell of the character.

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I’m not singling out First Light for this; it’s just the Bond game I played most recently and, if anything, does a good job realising him as a character. It’s just that, again, maybe that character should not be a videogame character.

One moment in particular in my time with First Light made me think this: 007 is doing righteous battle with a villain. Normal thing for 007 to do. During the fight, he grabs a teacup from the sideboard and drives it hard into his opponent’s face.

At this point he says something which I did not write down because I was in the middle of fighting a guy, so my recollection may be fuzzy, but I believe James Bond, 007, on His Majesty’s secret service, said something along the lines of, “Time for tea.”

I posit to you: is a man who will say “Time for tea,” or something close to it, upon assaulting some sort of international terrorist with a cup, the kind of person in whose head you want to spend 40 hours? He is not. But turning him into a man who doesn’t say that would make him not Bond.