“Bond moments” – James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing

**James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing** (EA, PlayStation 2, 2004)

Game adaptations of movies made up a sizeable subset of UK #1s in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, but a decade further on that level of success was a lot less common. Outside of Pixar’s computer-animation-ready output and the cross-media juggernaut of Harry Potter, very few games based directly on films made it. James Bond had provided a particularly successful example of an alternative, though. GoldenEye 007 may have shared a name with a film, but it was released two years later and its most popular mode had little to do with its source material. This was an approach ripe for taking further.

Others had done so. There were a huge number of Star Wars games, with how well they are remembered generally inversely proportional to how closely they stuck to the Star Wars films of the time. I doubt many would claim The Phantom Menace to be better than Knights of the Old Republic. Meanwhile Enter the Matrix took the approach of being a supplement to The Matrix Reloaded rather than an inferior replication, and was a commercial success despite its massive flaws. James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing mixes elements of all of these to produce something different again: a faithful game version of a non-existent Bond movie.

It’s all there. The range of locations, the supervillain with the ridiculous plan, the action, the quips, the girls, the silhouette-filled opening sequence. There’s even a title song from Mya. She would have been a slightly underwhelming choice to sing the theme song to an actual Bond movie, but a plausible one, and a genuine pop success with (one quarter of) a UK #1 single to her name. Likewise, the main actors from the films of the time provide likenesses and voices, and it’s a bit of a surprise that Everything or Nothing is the only time that Heidi Klum has played a Bond girl.

It’s a product with high production values and the advantage of having no cinematic counterpart to try, and inevitably fail, to live up to. The ‘Bond moments’, as the game calls them, can be its own. Its middle-of-the-road third person cover shooting can at least mostly feel like the plot is built around it, rather than feeling like a needless imposition. This is also one a point where EA’s sprawling tentacles come into play, as they are able to lift an engine from Need for Speed for the driving sections to supply an enjoyable chasing and explosion-dodging experience in a way which multi-genre movie games often haven’t. (The driving bits in Batman the Movie ruled though).

More than that, though, Everything or Nothing works because James Bond is absolutely perfect for this video game treatment. It may have taken three decades from the first books, and two decades from the first films, before he made it to video games (in 1982’s unofficial text adventure Shaken but not Stirred and 1983’s official shooter James Bond 007), but he was the archetypal AAA video game hero well before such a thing existed. He is the model for a huge swathe of the industry.

He is a sophisticated and charming guy who also has spells of killing huge numbers of people without a moment’s thought. His films work on skating from cool moment to cool moment, relying on momentum and audience generosity to skate over jarring variations in tone. He gets given gadgets with the seemingly most unlikely of uses, only for them to be perfect for the puzzle he faces an hour down the line. The rules of physics stretch to his narrative force. He operates to a background noise of sexism, and in a general atmosphere of imperial nostalgia, acting as the lovable face of colonialism. It makes sense that Britain’s most iconic games character was basically a female version of him. Even the Bond franchise’s endless retelling of the same story at different times with different people in the same archetypal roles fits into video games very well. For Bond, M and Q, see Link and Zelda. Really, it’s a wonder there haven’t been more successful Bond games, although that leaves plenty of material for this one to draw on.

If anything, the game goes a little too hard on trying to be a Bond greatest hits when it could have the confidence to stand alone. Does the bad guy being linked to an old Bond villain add much? Did Jaws really need to pop up again? The moment which best sums up the whole thing comes when Bond is in one of his various ~~product placements~~ cars. The game presents the task of escaping some patrolling vehicles and, as a method, provides an invisibility button for 007’s car. For a game ostensibly set in our world, it is the most ludicrous of video game contrivances. It’s also Bond movie canon.