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Inside the 7-year mission to reinvent James Bond with a new original story
IO Interactive director Hakan Abrak talks how his studio's Bond came to be.
IO Interactive
- Alex Raisbeck
Published: Wednesday, 27 May 2026 at 3:00 pm
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It's been five years since we bade farewell to Daniel Craig's Bond in No Time to Die, and while the world waits impatiently for a new era of 007, the truth is it's already here.
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007 First Light is the first major James Bond video game since 2012's 007 Legends, a game largely panned by critics and fans for failing to capture the Bond experience.
Between this decade-plus hiatus and the sheer enormity of Bond as a franchise, the expectations on whoever was to take on the task of developing the next 007 game were always going to be sky-high.
And yet, in Danish studio IO Interactive, Bond appears to have found his perfect match.
"To be honest with you, we'd never thought about working on a licensed game. We've never done that before," Hakan Abrak, IOI CEO and 007 First Light director, told Radio Times Gaming.
Bond represents a marked shift from the cold, emotionless Agent 47. IO Interactive
For the past 26 years, IOI has primarily been known for Hitman, a stealth series focusing on assassin Agent 47; while the morals behind the two protagonists may differ wildly, the core similarities are immediately apparent, something which played into IOI's hands.
"It was an external party contacting us," Hakan says, of how the team first became involved in the project, "talking about whether we would be interested in talking to MGM and Eon [Productions] about Bond.
"Since that point, a lot of other people have come to us with IPs, and we've not been interested, but this one just felt different, right?
"I know at this point, a lot of people are saying, 'Oh, it's a match made in heaven.' I know people are saying that, and we definitely felt the belief that we could do a fantastic Bond game."
Despite the hand-in-glove nature of an IOI-Bond partnership, Hakan stresses that from the start, development was never as clear-cut as it seemed from the outside.
"It's not just a reskin [of Hitman], it's a completely different IP. Hitman's Agent 47, he's an anti-hero and Bond is a hero; they're completely different demeanours, and it's a different fantasy, right?
"We had to go through a journey ourselves, creatively. Just the basic questions from the start: who is Hitman and who is Bond, compared to each other as well, right?"
Nevertheless, Hakan's vigour for the project is readily apparent: "From the get-go, it felt special. It felt different. It felt like a calling card for us."
Naturally, as with any adaptation, there are marks to hit, but for IOI, it was imperative that this game was not a simple retelling of Bond, but one emblematic of the studio itself.
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"It was very important to us that we really could put our fingerprints on it. It was important to us to have their trust for us to create a Bond from the ground up, and to create an original story and a completely different approach to the IP than has ever been done before in gaming.
"The first pitch that we did quickly was one of the levels in Hitman – Sapenza – and we put Daniel Craig's head on the Hitman, and we showed, well, there's several ways of doing this.
"This is part of IOI's secret sauce. It's not only about shooting somebody in the face and fisticuffing, right? You can complete a mission by disguise, or stealth, or puzzles, or different ways of manipulating the AI.
"When we showed that, I think they also gained confidence that we could deliver a Bond experience that explores other sides of Bond than just the action."
Even among licensed games, adapting Bond offers up a unique challenge by virtue of the scale and breadth of its source material.
Twelve novels and two short story collections from Ian Fleming laid the foundation, with 25 feature films compounding some of the deepest canon in modern fiction. Where do you draw from? What makes the cut? Where does one even begin?
"We tried to deduct the DNA throughout not only the different movies, but the different decades," Hakan recalled. "One of the unique abilities that this IP has displayed is that it's been successfully reinventing itself for different generations.
"We've been asking ourselves, 'What is that DNA that keeps this together?' and 'What is it that survives and is still interesting as a nucleus throughout decades and generations?'"
While so much of crafting an adaptation of 007 relies on capturing a certain Bond vibe, as it were, IOI did choose certain iconic aspects of Bond to draw from.
IOI's Bond has a scar on his face, just like in the original Fleming novelisation, for example, and it is this combination of a faithful adaptation of its source material and original input that the team hope will deliver something truly new for both Bond fans and gamers alike.
But the responsibility of working with a character as iconic as James Bond weighs heavy, and while IOI is used to pressure, the demands of Bond are different, and perhaps greater than ever before.
"It's not just a story, and a setting, and a cast and a performance – all that needs to feel through and through as a true Bond fantasy.
"We're used to a lot of pressure between Hitman games, right? A new iteration of Hitman is always being compared to the prior one, so this is part of what we do.
"But obviously, dealing with such a rich history of one of the biggest IPs ever, and acknowledging that this is the first time that we're doing something that is not our own, we've taken it extremely seriously.
"We have treated this as if it was our own IP. We are very well versed with being custodians of our own IP, and there are many things that we could do with Hitman that we choose not to because there's a certain expectation and purity to that IP.
"And we know how beloved Bond is as well, and so being well aware of responsibilities like that, we've treated this like it was our own and making sure that this adds to the fans in a positive way and not in a disrespectful way, of course."
007 First Light is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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Authors
Alex RaisbeckGaming writer
Alex Raisbeck is a Gaming Writer at Radio Times, covering everything from AAA giants to indie gems. Alex has written for VideoGamer, GamesRadar+, PC Gamer, PCGamesN and more.
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