Key art for ‘007 First Light’
Courtesy of IO Interactive
As Amazon MGM begins its search for the next James Bond star—a process that is certain to last a good, long time—fans of the long-running espionage franchise can find (quantum of) solace in 007 First Light.
Now available from Hitman developer IO Interactive, the video game presents a new origin story for the debonair secret agent known for his license to kill, quippy one-liners, and a predilection for shaken vodka martinis. Dexter: Original Sin alum Patrick Gibson takes on the role of a 26-year-old Bond, who starts out as a green-horned MI6 recruit fresh out of his service as a Royal Navy air crewman.
“You are not the Bond that everyone’s been watching in the films for the last 10 to 20 years,” First Light co-composer Alexis Smith recently told me over Zoom. “You’re someone who is going to get there, but you’re not there yet.”
As a child growing up in the United Kingdom throughout the ‘80s and ’90s, Smith was practically raised on the Dalton and Brosnan movies. “James Bond is within us, it’s part of us,” he said of the character’s hallowed place in British culture. “I think Casino Royale is the best film, but GoldenEye has a special place in my heart, because it was the one that came out as I was just starting to work in the music industry. I had just turned pro, and the guy I was working for worked on the Tina Turner track. I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.”
He and his collaborator Joe Henson form a musical duo known as The Flight (Henson was unable to join our call due to illness), whose gaming résumé includes Alien: Isolation, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Gotham Knights. Despite such impressive credits and a deep affection for the franchise, the pair were initially wary of tackling an IP as iconic as James Bond after IO Interactive audio director Dominic Vega offered them the job.
“We initially thought, ‘Are we the right people to do this?’” Smith shared, citing his and Henson’s lack of a traditional film or music training as a reason for the hesitancy. “We both had an electronic loop and sound-based music background. When we were 20, we didn’t know where you’re supposed to put your second cellos in an arrangement, stuff like that … The way we do the percussion, the way we do the drums, the way we do all the rhythm synths—even if it ends up being a somewhat orchestral score, you can still hear our background underneath all of it.”
Vega, however, put their minds at ease when he said, “’This is a new thing, a new origin story. This is going to be modern,’” Smith remembered. “And we were like, ‘Okay, great. That gives us an in to use The Flight sound, as well as combining it with what people think of when they, when they think of Bond.’”
“So, we did a lot of rewatching, re-listening to all the great scores that people have done,” he continued. “One of the brilliant things about Bond, is that loads of good composers have worked on it and taken it in all different directions. There’s loads of malleability with the themes and scores already. That gives you a bit more permission as to what you can do with it. If you’re working on a franchise that’s only ever been down one route musically, then it’s quite hard to move it anywhere else.”
That constant evolution, Smith mused, has allowed the brand to remain successful in the pop culture space over the last 64 years.
“They keep reinventing,” he said. “Being able to have the same character, but played by different people, rather than it just being one person getting older and older. [They] keep using new directing talent, new composing talent [and] the song always being someone who’s current and relevant.”
Indeed, First Light has its own original theme song, performed 11-time Grammy Award-winner by Lana Del Rey, who co-wrote the track with 007 vet David Arnold (The World is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace).
Like any good Bond composers, The Flight wanted to “weave the melody into the score,” Smith added. “You can hear which ones got the song early and managed to do it really successfully, and you can hear the ones where maybe the song came in right at the end and they couldn’t. We really wanted to get some elements of that, use it as another another tool, another theme.”
Tempting as it might be to immediately jump into John Barry’s famous theme, The Flight decided “to hold back on this one,” given the fact that the titular spy begins as a neophyte in the elite 00-Programme.
“We didn’t want to come straight in with all the recognizable stuff,” Smith noted. “We wanted to start from a different place and let the character earn the James Bond theme as it goes on. When you first start going out on missions, when you first start doing really Bond-y things, that’s when we give the player what they know.”
While a lot of the work was done at The Flight’s London studio, where the team plays around with “a lot of electronics, synths, guitars,” there had to be an orchestral element as well. “It’s very important for Bond to have brass, strings,” Smith affirmed. “We did a big brass session at Abbey Road with loads of players who’d played on previous Bond scores and songs. Then we did a string session as well. It brings it all to life.”
There was a brief moment in time, when Amazon finalized its purchase of MGM and assumed control of the 007 mythos from longtime producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, that the composers feared the project might be in jeopardy.
“We were worried that it was going to be suddenly taken off in a different direction or that they were going to want sweeping changes,” Smith confessed. “But I think IO had such a strong thing going on by that point, that when Amazon came in, they could see this was going to be good and trusted them.”
007 First Light is out now from IO Interactive