Video game studios revisit classic film franchises to attract older players

PARIS: Video game publishers are increasingly drawing on well-known film franchises from the 1980s and 1990s as they seek to appeal to ageing millennial players, with a new James Bond title arriving after an Indiana Jones release and a Jurassic Park game also on the way.

Rasmus Poulsen, art director for 007 First Light, said he had long wanted to work on a Bond project. Poulsen, who is in his 40s, told AFP ahead of the game’s release on Wednesday that he had worked on many different projects but had always kept an eye on Bond. He also runs a YouTube channel featuring 3D models of spacecraft from the Star Wars and Star Trek universes, reflecting how developers from his generation are now adapting the fictional worlds they admired in childhood.

Alexis Blanchet, a cinema and media lecturer at Paris’ Sorbonne-Nouvelle University, said Bond was especially suited to gaming because of the character’s action-driven nature. He said publishers were turning to familiar characters because the average age of players had been rising and studios were aware of that shift.

Bond returns to gaming

007 First Light is the first Bond game in more than a decade. Earlier attempts to build on the success of 1997 Nintendo 64 hit Goldeneye failed to leave a strong impression on many players. The new title is also the first Bond game released since Amazon took control of the franchise through its 2022 acquisition of MGM.

Developed by IO Interactive, the studio behind Hitman, the game presents a reworked Bond origin story. It places players in the role of a young and inexperienced version of the spy who is still proving himself.

Games and culture journalist Keith Stuart wrote in a newsletter this month that it was logical for Amazon’s first move into Bond mythology to come through gaming rather than cinema. He argued that the character’s legacy on film had become more difficult in modern times and that the role of a contemporary British secret agent was less certain.

Old formula, new market

Film-based video games have existed since the late 1970s, but the format was especially prominent from the mid-1980s, when titles were often launched alongside major cinema releases. Many of those games were seen by players as low-quality tie-ins designed to benefit from film marketing campaigns.

By the 2000s, some franchises began producing games that expanded or complemented the worlds shown on screen. But Blanchet’s data showed the category declined sharply in the early 2010s. He estimated that between 1975 and 2011, only 547 films inspired around 2,000 games, accounting for 10 per cent of all titles published during that period.

Blanchet said the current return to established pop-culture series reflected the industry’s normal operating pattern rather than a genuine revival. He said publishers were trying to improve the chances of success by relying on characters already recognised by large audiences, especially at a time when the wider games industry had been struggling for more than two years.

Recent outcomes have been mixed. Titles such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Hogwarts Legacy performed well, while Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws received a more uneven response. Stuart wrote that modern games could avoid the complications of troubled film franchises by giving fans the parts of those worlds they still wanted, without carrying over weaker storylines or restrictive mythology.