007 First Light Was Originally an Ensemble Spy Game, IO Interactive Writer Reveals

IO Interactive’s very first pitch for 007 First Light imagined it as an ensemble piece, with a squad of double-O agents working together rather than a game about James Bond alone. Main writer Michael Vogt revealed the abandoned direction in an interview at the studio’s Brighton office, describing the training-sequence camaraderie players enjoyed as a deliberate setup for the rug-pull that follows. Spoilers for the game follow.

The traces of that original plan are still all over the finished game.

The False Promise

First Light opens with MI6 restarting the double-O programme and recruiting Bond alongside a group of other young hopefuls in training. He heads to Malta, gradually ingratiates himself with the other trainees, and shares a large, airy London flat with two of them, Cressida and Monroe, forming a particularly close bond with both. The banter and friendly rivalry across Malta, London and the initial Slovakia mission are among the game’s best-received sections, and they would presumably have carried through the whole thing under the original design.

Instead, the game turns. “During the training sequence, we make a false promise,” Vogt told Eurogamer. “Basically we’re saying this is going to be an ensemble piece, all the double-Os working together, as they do in Slovakia. And then we pull the rug out from under you when most of them die, and serendipitously, [Bond’s] the last man standing. He could have died in that explosion but he doesn’t, and so he emerges as the top agent. But in my very first pitch I think we were actually toying with the idea of making it an ensemble piece, that you had the different agents working together.”

Vogt could not recall when the approach changed, the original pitch having happened seven years ago, but he was clear on why. “The story beat that it serves is of course that it goes from all fun and games for him, he’s a young kid, he’s on an adventure, and he’s out globe trotting and playing secret agent, but after that explosion, he wakes up to the more harsh reality,” he said. “When M said that life expectancy is very short, it’s like, ‘Oh, right.’ He gets it. And he matures from that, of course, and also from the guilt, maybe the survivor’s guilt, of being the one who made it.” Keeping the ensemble as a first act rather than a structure is what lets the game earn that shift, since the loss only lands if the player spent time liking the people who die.

A Lighter Bond Than Planned

The whole game once carried a more serious tone, partly a product of when it was conceived. First Light was pitched seven years ago, in the wake of the Daniel Craig era, which concluded in 2021 with the sad ending of No Time to Die. Shaking that off took IO a while.

“We probably shifted the genre ever so slightly from more of a straight spy thriller to something that was a little bit more action-adventure, dialled up the comedy a little bit, maybe the charm, the spark,” Vogt said. “We always wanted it to be aspirational. He’s a young guy so whatever turns him jaded along the way, it hasn’t happened to him yet, so he should have that sense of bright-eyed wonder being so young.”

Even by the end, Vogt does not read this Bond as jaded. “Not at all,” he said. “He matures, for sure, in many different ways, but he’s not jaded at all. In fact he basically manages to change MI6, it’s not the other way around. He changes the characters around him. Greenway goes through a redemption arc because of him. He even slightly makes Isola more of a human being towards the end. And he’s always done that. I don’t see James Bond as someone who goes through wide, dramatic arcs. He shifts ever so slightly and then most of the time, he changes people around him.”

What Comes Next, and What Complicates It

The commercial and critical case for more is already made. Eurogamer’s review awarded the game four stars and called it “a narrative tour-de-force”, and it sold 2.7 million copies in a week. What muddies the picture is ownership: 007 First Light was self-published by IO Interactive, but Amazon now owns the James Bond franchise and wants to be involved in whatever happens next.

The studio has also had a rough stretch, suffering a round of layoffs and an office closure after Xbox cancelled its publishing deal for the role-playing game Project Fantasy. “There has [been a ripple effect],” Vogt said of that. “I think the entire studio has been affected in some way or another, sadly.”

In the near term, IO is working on DLC for 007 First Light, including a story-led adventure set fairly quickly after the events of the game that returns to Aleph and to Lenny Kravitz’s character Bawma for a new mission.