IO Interactive – the team behind the rather brilliant (in my humble opinion) Hitman games – hopes its upcoming James Bond origin story will be the start of a trilogy.
Speaking with IGN, IO boss Hakan Abrak said the team feels like it’s had “20 plus years of training for the agent fantasy”, thanks to Hitman. Indeed, Agent 47 is very Bond-like with his seemingly endless talents and ability to handle any weapon under the sun.
“But obviously James Bond is a different IP. It’s a huge IP. It’s not our IP. It’s actually the first IP that is not our original IP from the ground up,” Abrak told the publication, adding one of the most exciting parts of the upcoming release is that it will be an original story for the British spy.
“So it’s not a gamification of a movie,” Abrak continued. “It’s completely beginning and becoming a story, hopefully for a big trilogy out there in the future. And equally important and exciting, it’s a new Bond. It’s a Bond we built from the ground up for gamers. It’s extremely exciting with all the tradition and all the history there is… to work on this together with the family [and create] a Bond that the gamers can call their own and grow with.”
“It’s been, what, almost 15 years since the last game. So it’s been a long time,” Abrak added. “It definitely is something that is not overexposed in gaming. We actually see that as a strength… There’s a lot of people out there who think about GoldenEye as the classic… I don’t want to speak too big about it, but I just hope we’ll do a thing that will define James Bond in gaming for years to come. And that is not only one game, but that we create a universe for gamers to own for many years to come that we can grow with that next to the Bond on the movies.”
As for when we’ll all get to see the fruits of the studio’s labours, that’s still a mystery for now. “I don’t have an update today, but believe me, it’s itching here as well to be talking about it soon,” Abrak admitted. “So we are following our plans. The production’s going amazingly well and we will soon be talking more about it. I know it was a little teaser, not a lot of information, but there’s a lot of cool stuff coming up.”
IO first announced its James Bond game back in 2021. Very little has been shared on it since, although our Bertie managed to tease a few extra 00-details out of the team last year.
But while we may have to wait a little longer to hear anything more concrete on IO’s James Bond, the studio has also announced it’s taking on publishing duties for MindsEye, the big-budget action adventure in the works from former Rockstar exec Leslie Benzies.