Millenial gamers who grew up on 80s and 90s blockbusters are today being courted by the \u00a0industry, with the latest James Bond offering hard on the heels of an Indiana Jones adventure and soon to be followed by \u201cJurassic Park\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve worked on a lot of different projects, but always had an eye to Bond,\u201d Rasmus Poulsen, art director for \u201c007 First Light\u201d, set for release on Wednesday, told AFP ahead of the game\u2019s publication.<\/p>\n
The Dane, in his 40s, also runs a YouTube channel showing off 3D models of spacecraft from the Star Wars and Star Trek universes \u2014 underscoring his part in a generation of game developers now turning their hands to adapting the worlds they fantasised about as kids.<\/p>\n
With his firearms, high-tech gadgets, luxury cars and over-the-top flirting, \u201cJames Bond is a perfect fit for video games, because he\u2019s a character built around the imperative to act,\u201d said Alexis Blanchet, a cinema and media lecturer at Paris\u2019 Sorbonne-Nouvelle University.<\/p>\n
The British agent had not appeared in a game title for more than a decade before \u201cFirst Light\u201d \u2014 with follow-ups to 1997 Nintendo 64 mega-hit \u201cGoldeneye\u201d leaving most players neither shaken nor stirred.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst Light\u201d is also the first game with the Bond franchise under the stewardship of Amazon, which bought studio MGM in 2022.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Modern reboot \u2013<\/p>\n
Built by \u201cHitman\u201d developers IO Interactive, \u201cFirst Light\u201d offers a new version of Bond\u2019s origin story, dropping players into the shoes of a cocky but callow young version of the spy still earning his stripes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt makes sense that Amazon\u2019s first dip into 007 mythology should be with a game,\u201d games and culture journalist Keith Stuart of British paper The Guardian argued in a newsletter this month.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the cinema, Bond\u2019s legacy as a character has become problematic and his motivations as a modern British secret agent uncertain,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Video game adaptations of films date back as far as the late 1970s.<\/p>\n
But they had their moment in the sun from the mid-1980s, with games often released alongside blockbusters\u2019 appearance in cinemas.<\/p>\n
Frequently of questionable quality, the tie-in games felt to many players like a cash grab profiting from the movies\u2019 marketing campaigns.<\/p>\n
By the 2000s, some franchises offered games that fleshed out or complemented the worlds depicted on the silver screen.<\/p>\n
But data provided by Blanchet shows the genre rapidly tailing off in the early 2010s.<\/p>\n
\u2013 Ageing gamers \u2013<\/p>\n
Betwen 1975 and 2011, just 547 films inspired around 2,000 games \u2014 10 percent of the total published over the period, he estimated.<\/p>\n
Blanchet argued that today\u2019s resurgence in beloved pop-culture sagas is part of the \u201croutine functioning\u201d of the industry, rather than representing any kind of \u201crenewal\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe average age of video game players has been getting older, and studios know it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
To stand out, publishers \u201ctry to guarantee their game will succeed\u201d by including characters known and loved by large audiences.<\/p>\n
The pressure is all the greater given the doldrums the whole games industry has been traversing for more than two years, Blanchet noted.<\/p>\n
Successes like \u201cIndiana Jones and the Great Circle\u201d or \u201cHogwarts Legacy\u201d have been matched by more mixed receptions, such as for \u201cStar Wars Outlaws\u201d from Ubisoft.<\/p>\n
That chance of success means audiences are likely to see still more adaptations in the coming years.<\/p>\n
\u201cModern video games are able to sidestep the complexities of, let\u2019s say, compromised cinematic franchises, giving fans the bits of the experience they want without the detritus of dodgy story arcs and straitjacketed mythologies,\u201d journalist Stuart wrote.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Millenial gamers who grew up on 80s and 90s blockbusters are today being courted by the \u00a0industry, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[49,48,77,165111,61,4390],"class_list":["post-695567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-international","tag-mna","tag-technology","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}