- 007 First light game director Hakan Abrak says the game was always planned as an origin story
- He says the team pitched to MGM and had ideas for a young Bond story that were a “non-negotiable”
- He adds that there were weekly feedback meetings, but the IO was always responsible for the story
IO Interactive has confirmed this 007 First light was always intended to be a young James Bond story, and it often collaborated with the franchise owner, Amazon MGM Studios.
In an interview with TechRadar Gaming at an event alongside Summer Game Fest 2026, game director Hakan Abrak discussed the conceptual stage of the game and confirmed that First light was “always meant to be a young Bond story,” and the pitching process to MGM and Bond IP co-owners Barbara Broccolo and Michael G. Wilson was “massively intimidating.”
Abrak recalled that the pitching process was in a room decorated with old books from James Bond novelist Ian Fleming, a grand piano, and “the atmosphere of the story was so thick you could just cut through it.”
When he and other IO team members went in to pitch, he recalled that the MGM heads came into the room and were “totally quiet” before asking the developers to go ahead and pitch.
“We’re pitching the story, we’re pitching our approach and why this would be different from other Bond games,” Abrak said. “[They were] very quiet, and then Barbara just says, after a while, stonefaced just says, ‘I like it,’ and then the room just erupted right after; [they said] “These guys are so cool, like they don’t really get it, I was like keep my cool and stuff, but deep down I was like, ‘phew,’ that was something.”
The game director noted that he thought IO’s initial pitch was “a bit ballsy”, and the team had plenty of ideas to introduce aspects from Ian Fleming novels, such as James Bond’s scars, and create a young coming-of-age story “where it’s not like he’s got it all figured out.”
Abrak said the team didn’t want to recreate a “perfect digital version of Daniel Craig, I love Daniel Craig, but it just wanted to make something that felt original.”
“More importantly, what we also told them was that we want to go after the players, we want to create a Bond for the players,” he said, explaining that some young players may not have a familiar attachment to Bond like the older generation.
“We [wanted] to take that risk and introduce a new Bond to the players,” he said, “We want to make a Bond for the players, not gamify a movie. It is difficult [to go there] with non-marketable securities, but this was non-marketable for us. If we did this, we had to get this freedom for this approach. So this was very, very clear from the start.”
While IO had creative control over the story, Abrak said there was input from MGM, as well as several sessions of casting, before Paddy Gibson was cast as Bond. The team also had weekly meetings with Eon Productions, the British film production company that primarily produced the Bond film series.
“Although the story was written by the IO and delivered by us, we got a lot of feedback,” he said. “I think we had some affinity and we had something to start with, like with Danish dark humor, dry humor, but getting the British humor right there [was] still a long way to go.
“It’s been hugely helpful, and we’re really interested in it, and I think for the younger generation of Eon creators that we’ve had meetings with, and the artwork from the movies that [was] also tied to that, it was very, very exciting for them to get started because they were actually making a new [Bond] from the bottom.
“It was a collaboration; they were very involved, but it was always IO, doing the story, doing the characters and things, and then getting feedback and working closely together.”
007 First light is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S and PC. A Nintendo Switch 2 version is scheduled to launch sometime this year.
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