When news broke in November that Hitman developer IO Interactive announced its next project will be a James Bond game, the gaming community loudly rejoiced — and rightly so.
After all, the Danish development studio is arguably the perfect entity to tackle this prospect; the Hitman games share so much with the James Bond film franchise — exotic locations, outlandish villains and a protagonist tasked with assassination. IO could probably have gotten away with simply giving Agent 47 a head of hair and some tattoo removal.
Naturally, the studio has bigger plans than that, but details were scarce about the upcoming 007 game until now. According to a report on Games Radar, IO Interactive’s Studio Director Hakan Abrak says that the game will feature an entirely new James Bond — one that won’t be based on any of the actors who previously appeared in the films — and that the game’s story would be a prequel to the films themselves.
James Bond, but playable
Abrak says the game will be “a completely original story,” which means that it won’t be based on any of the cinematic adventures 007 has featured in thus far. The new digital Bond will also be far younger in the game than any of his real-life counterparts.
The report goes onto say that IO Interactive is hoping to produce a trilogy of 007 games — much as it did for the superb World Of Assassination Hitman games, which concluded recently with Hitman 3. This sounds rather ambitious — usually, publishers and developers have to wait to see whether their latest game is a financial success before announcing a sequel. but a report on The Escapist notes that IO Interactive is planning to double the number of employees involved in the game, so one can’t question its commitment to this project.
The only downsides to this news are the facts that Project 007, as it’s currently called, will likely take a couple of years at least to see release and since IO Interactive is now committed to this new undertaking, we might not see Agent 47 for the foreseeable future.
Still, we’d be lying if we didn’t say that the prospect of an IO Interactive James Bond game doesn’t have us excited — even if that excitement is tempered with the prospect of a long wait.