The list of James Bond video games is long, but the list of ones people actually love is shockingly short. While 007 fans can argue until the end of time about which of the 25 official (and two unofficial) movies is the best, the conversation about Bond games generally begins and ends with GoldenEye, Rare’s 1997 N64 game that transformed the industry’s approach to first-person shooters. But the Bond game that immediately followed GoldenEye wasn’t on the N64, wasn’t in first-person, and didn’t even have a multiplayer mode. Twenty-five years ago, on November 16, 1999, Tomorrow Never Dies was released on PlayStation and nearly murdered Bond games.
The fact that GoldenEye was based on the 1995 Pierce Brosnan-led Bond movie of the same name was only tangentially related to its huge success. If you were a teenager caught up in the craze who could name the movies Oddjob and Baron Samedi had appeared in, you were in the minority. GoldenEye worked for many reasons, but one was that, even though the game paid homage to Bond’s history, players didn’t need to know anything about the franchise to enjoy it. The developers of Tomorrow Never Dies completely ignored this lesson.
This paradox couldn’t have been predicted in the late 1990s. Brosnan’s portrayal of Bond in 1995 gave the film franchise a shot in the arm, but having GoldenEye, the game, come out two years after GoldenEye, the movie, had left theaters was risky. The game’s huge success was a surprise. So when Tomorrow Never Dies was created by Black Ops Entertainment and Electronic Arts a few years later, it’s easy to see what happened. It was assumed that Tomorrow Never Dies could also come out two years after its parent movie and be fine.
That assumption was wrong, and Tomorrow Never Dies was doomed by the fact it lacked that all-important multiplayer mode. That was the special sauce that made the GoldenEye so unique; 007’s world was transformed into a collaborative and competitive experience, rather than an exclusively solo narrative about a man on a mission. But while GoldenEye is a better game in every sense of the word, Tomorrow Never Dies might actually be a more faithful Bond game.
As a game you can complete in a day, Tomorrow Never Dies is decent for its time, if you’re looking to replicate a James Bond adventure and don’t mind doing it alone. Unlike GoldenEye, Tomorrow Never Dies is a third-person game, meaning you spend a lot of time looking at James Bond’s backside. This is arguably truer to Bond’s literary roots; all the novels, save for one, are told in the third person. GoldenEye’s first-person action made for a better game, but in some spiritual sense, it was less true to how we consume Bond’s adventures.
As a game, well, you move Bond through various missions where you have to find things and shoot people as you re-tread the film’s story. There’s a driving level and a decent amount of skiing, which is also very true to the Bond ethos. But the game mechanics never really manage to appeal in their own right.
While Tomorrow Never Dies succeeded as a film in 1997, in 1999, the game was a critical and commercial failure. This immediately led to Bond games swinging back toward the GoldenEye model in 2000, when The World is Not Enough imitated GoldenEye, featured the all-important multiplayer mode, and sold a million copies. But all these years later, there still hasn’t been a Bond game with GoldenEye’s massive impact.
IO Interactive is currently working on a game called Project 007, which, in the mold of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, promises a “wholly original” James Bond story. This, if it goes well, could be a new chapter that pulls Bond’s gaming side out of a lull that’s lasted for the 12 years since 007 Legends was released. It’s not the fault of games like Tomorrow Never Dies that we haven’t had great Bond games since GoldenEye. It’s mostly GoldenEye’s fault for just being so great. As Carly Simon sang in The Spy Who Loves Me, nobody does it half as good as you. This is the curse all Bond games have faced; Tomorrow Never Dies was just the first victim.
