There’s something amusing about today’s interview with Adam Gascoine, co-design director for the game James Bond: Quantum of Solace.
The interviewer at semi-official Playstation blog Three Speech is intent on framing this conversation around “the spectre of GoldenEye still looming large in the background.” It’s not long before Gascoine mentions that his team played a hefty amount of the classic Nintendo 64 game, and our interviewer pounces:
I’m glad you mentioned it before I did! I suppose there were two options with that game - not to go anywhere near it, or to immerse yourselves in it. It seems like you chose the latter?
Gascoine is reluctant to budge. It becomes clear that this isn’t a GoldenEye clone. “Yes, we immersed ourselves in it! We’re a very different game though, because obviously GoldenEye is eight or nine years old,” he says, adding that while the team learned from the game, there are just a lot of elements that don’t fit anymore.
Good for him. We all have fond memories of GoldenEye, but you have to admit the console first-person shooter was ahead of its time back then. Games like Halo represent the genre growing into its clothes. Exhibit A: GoldenEye had a controller layout that would make a modern FPS player tear his hands off. “GoldenEye was the first game to use a controller in that way – we can’t recreate that,” Gascoine says. “So we said, let’s get a great engine, let’s get great controls, and let’s do what the equivalent is right now, and that’s Call of Duty 4.”
Still, our interviewer presses, “What else have you been able to draw from GoldenEye?”
Gascoine’s best answer is that the game has “this extraordinary intensity. You felt so powerful playing it, we wanted to capture that.” In other words, they drew on nothing. Exhibit B: All shooter games (or at least the better ones) are intense, and make you feel powerful.
Gascoine shifts the conversation topic to actor Daniel Craig’s physicality and how great it was working with him (and, presumably, not Pierce Brosnan?). Unfazed, our interviewer sneaks in one more question at the end of the interview: Will the new game also have lots of characters and weapons from the whole series? The Answer:
No, we didn’t touch that.
In conclusion, this game is not like GoldenEye, aside from the IP. And there’s nothing wrong with that. How about we let Gascoine make his own game, and we’ll see how it fairs on November 4.
