The video game industry is tapping into nostalgia, targeting millennial gamers who grew up watching 80s and 90s blockbusters. The latest James Bond title follows close behind an Indiana Jones adventure, with Jurassic Park set to join the line-up.

“I’ve worked on a lot of different projects, but always had an eye to Bond,” said Rasmus Poulsen, art director for 007 First Light, which releases on Wednesday. The Danish developer, in his 40s, also runs a YouTube channel featuring 3D models of spacecraft from Star Wars and Star Trek, highlighting a generation of game developers now adapting the worlds they fantasised about as children.

With firearms, high-tech gadgets, luxury cars and over-the-top flirting, “James Bond is a perfect fit for video games, because he’s a character built around the imperative to act,” said Alexis Blanchet, a cinema and media lecturer at Paris’ Sorbonne-Nouvelle University.

The British secret agent had not appeared in a game title for more than a decade before First Light. Follow-ups to the 1997 Nintendo 64 mega-hit Goldeneye left most players neither shaken nor stirred.

First Light marks the first game with the Bond franchise under Amazon’s stewardship, which bought studio MGM in 2022.

Modern reboot

Built by Hitman developers IO Interactive, First Light offers a fresh take on Bond’s origin story, placing players in the shoes of a cocky but inexperienced young spy still earning his stripes.

“It makes sense that Amazon’s first dip into 007 mythology should be with a game,” said Keith Stuart, games and culture journalist at The Guardian, in a newsletter this month.

“In the cinema, Bond’s legacy as a character has become problematic and his motivations as a modern British secret agent uncertain,” he added.

Video game adaptations of films date back to the late 1970s, with the genre enjoying its heyday from the mid-1980s when games often released alongside blockbusters’ cinema debuts. Frequently of questionable quality, the tie-in games felt like cash grabs profiting from the movies’ marketing campaigns.

By the 2000s, some franchises offered games that fleshed out or complemented the worlds depicted on screen. However, data provided by Blanchet shows the genre rapidly tailing off in the early 2010s.

Ageing gamers

Between 1975 and 2011, just 547 films inspired around 2 000 games, representing 10% of the total published over the period, Blanchet estimated.

He argued that today’s resurgence in beloved pop-culture sagas is part of the “routine functioning” of the industry rather than representing any kind of renewal.

“The average age of video game players has been getting older, and studios know it,” he said.

To stand out, publishers “try to guarantee their game will succeed” by including characters known and loved by large audiences.

The pressure is greater given the doldrums the games industry has been traversing for more than two years, Blanchet noted.

Successes like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle or Hogwarts Legacy have been matched by more mixed receptions, such as Star Wars Outlaws from Ubisoft.

That chance of success means audiences are likely to see more adaptations in the coming years.

“Modern video games are able to sidestep the complexities of, let’s say, compromised cinematic franchises, giving fans the bits of the experience they want without the detritus of dodgy story arcs and straitjacketed mythologies,” Stuart wrote.

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