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MCV 15/10/10 23 THE RETURN OF JAMES BOND
The new Bond games capture the likeness of Daniel Craig (right). Meanwhile Joss Stone’s likeness has been captured in-game (left).
Q&A BRIEFING: BRUCE FEIRSTEIN
The screenwriter behind GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Diesis responsible for both of Activision’s latest Bondtitles…
What are the differences between writing for films and games? Games have a huge advantage over movies: you can go anywhere in the world and there’s no additional production cost. It would be prohibitively expensive to make a Bondmovie that jumped around from Monaco to Burma to Russia. In a game, you can put all of those in. Blood Stoneopens in Greece at the
Parthenon and the harbour in Athens. If you were making a movie, that alone is a huge undertaking, but games allow you to have huge set- pieces across various countries. The possibilities are larger than in films.
What were the key challenges of writing an original storyline for Blood Stone? Having to create a story that plays out over ten to 12 levels, so you have to think about it on a grander scale. Secondly, you want to create characters that are interesting and haven’t been seen before, which is what we’re trying to do with Joss Stone’s character Nicole Hunter. You still have all the same challenges you
“Games allow you to have huge set-pieces in various countries. The possibilities are larger than in films.”
developers have been constantly liasing with the company behind the movies. “We’ve worked closely with EON Productions, enabling us to have on-site meetings at Eurocom’s headquarters in Derby,” says Widdows. “We’ve had Bruce Feirstein and David G. Wilson on site, and we’ve been able to present everything to Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson. They’ve been heavily involved in the casting process – having all of those people within the same time zone has been a real benefit.” These blockbuster-level production values are apparent in each game, and key to their appeal in the busy Christmas season. Davies says the films are an ideal inspiration for Bond games. He says: “Although Bond existed in a literal form first, everyone’s experience
of the series is based on the films. People want a slick, cinematic experience from Bond games. That’s what they’ve seen in the cinema so that’s what they expect from Blood Stone and GoldenEye.
“For us, it was a lot easier to have people from the film side of the franchise help us with the design and concepts, because they can take their experiences from making the last two films and help us translate that into game terms.”
YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE It’s not only the shared qualities that ensure Activision’s Bond line-up will dominate the world this November. Each one has enough of its own unique appeal to make them stand out as
blockbuster releases. For Wii owners, the second life of GoldenEye is momentous news. Far from wanting to depend on the prestige of the original, Activision has worked hard to differentiate this new vision of the classic FPS from a straight port. It’s a tactic that has already drawn plenty of press and consumer attention, with anticipation building in a way that even Activision didn’t expect. “If we had done a remake, it would have been directly compared with the first game,” said Widdows.
“There will always be a minority who feel that no matter what you do, it wasn’t the right direction for GoldenEye and that’s why it was important to make this a great game, first and foremost. Even with its nostalgia points, it has to
face when writing a movie: to create a riveting story and to create unique and original characters.
What was the challenge of reimaginging GoldenEye? The main thing was that so much time has passed. If we were to do the original storyline, the former KGB agents like Zukovsky would be in their sixties. It’s a different world now. These days, Russian bad guys aren’t arms dealers – they’re buying British football teams. So we modernised the world around the story, keeping the basic plot, but making it relevant to modern day.
Will James Bond return to films? [laughs]I’m not worried about all this talk around the delay to the next Bondfilm. There was a six-year hiatus between Licence to Killand GoldenEye. James Bondisn’t going anywhere. It’s too valuable and too much in popular culture not to have another Bondfilm.
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