IO Interactive once considered making 007 First Light more of an ensemble piece than it turned out to be. In other words, the game would have been less about James Bond on his own and more about him and a team of agents working together.

Be aware that spoilers follow.

The traces of IO’s original approach can still be felt in First Light, as British spy headquarters MI6 restarts the double-O programme and recruits Bond to join a series of other young hopefuls-in-training. Bond jets to Malta and slowly ingratiates himself with the other trainees there. He even shares an enviably large and airy flat back in London with a couple of them, Cressida and Monroe, who he forms a particularly close bond with.

And it’s that camaraderie – the banter and the same sense of friendly rivalry – in Malta and London, and on that initial mission to Slovakia, that would have presumably stretched through the game. These are sections of First Light that have gone down really well with players; personally speaking, I thought the agent friends brought a great sense of warmth and fun.

But 007 First Light does not see this approach through. Suddenly, it takes a turn. “During the training sequence, we make a false promise,” Michael Vogt, the game’s main writer, told me at IO Interactive’s office in Brighton this week. “Basically we’re saying this is going to be an ensemble piece, all the double-Os working together, as they do in Slovakia. And then we pull the rug out from under you when most of them die, and serendipitously, [Bond’s] the last man standing. He could have died in that explosion but he doesn’t, and so he emerges as the top agent. But in my very first pitch I think we were actually toying with the idea of making it an ensemble piece, that you had the different agents working together.”

Vogt couldn’t remember when this approach changed – the original pitch happened seven years ago so forgive him – but he did recall the reason it changed. “The story beat that it serves is of course that it goes from all fun and games for him – he’s a young kid, he’s on an adventure, and he’s out globe trotting and playing secret agent – but after that explosion, he wakes up to the more harsh reality. When M said that life expectancy is very short, it’s like, ‘Oh, right.’ He gets it. And he matures from that, of course, and also from the guilt – maybe the survivor’s guilt – of being the one who made it.”

“We probably shifted the genre ever so slightly from more of a straight spy thriller to something that was a little bit more action-adventure” -Michael Vogt

In that moment, Bond, like First Light, gets a bit more serious. And apparently the entire game once had a more serious tone. Some of this was to do with First Light being developed in the wake of the Daniel Craig era of Bond films, which concluded in 2021 with the release of No Time to Die – a film with a sad ending. Consider that 007 First Light was pitched seven years ago and its genesis would have been slap-bang in that sad-ending moment.

Shaking that mindset and discovering Bond for itself took IO a while. “We probably shifted the genre ever so slightly from more of a straight spy thriller to something that was a little bit more action-adventure – dialled up the comedy a little bit, maybe the charm, the spark,” Vogt said. “We always wanted it to be aspirational. He’s a young guy so whatever turns him jaded along the way, it hasn’t happened to him yet, so he should have that sense of bright-eyed wonder being so young.”

Yet, even after everything that happens to IO’s Bond over the course of the game, Vogt doesn’t consider him jaded by the end of it. “Not at all,” he assured me. “He matures, for sure, in many different ways, but he’s not jaded at all. In fact he basically manages to change MI6 – it’s not the other way around. He changes the characters around him. Greenway goes through a redemption arc because of him. He even slightly makes Isola more of a human being towards the end. And he’s always done that. I don’t see James Bond as someone who goes through wide, dramatic arcs. He shifts ever so slightly and then most of the time, he changes people around him.”

What’s next for IO’s James Bond, we don’t yet know. A strong critical reception – Eurogamer’s review awarded 007: First Light four stars and called it “a narrative tour-de-force” – coupled with 2.7m sales in a week strongly suggests there’s a future for it. But there’s the added complication of Amazon now owning the James Bond franchise and wanting to be involved with whatever happens next. 007 First Light was self-published by IO Interactive.

The studio has also suffered a round of layoffs and an office closure following the cancellation of a publishing deal with Xbox for role-playing game Project Fantasy. “There has [been a ripple effect],” Vogt told me in relation to this. “I think the entire studio has been affected in some way or another, sadly.”

In the near-term, IO Interactive is working on DLC for 007 First Light, including a story-led adventure that takes place “fairly quickly” after the events of the game and takes us back to Aleph and to Lenny Kravitz’s character Bawma for a new mission.