Coming to You in Glorious 4-Bit Graphics

I do love going back and looking at classic games from the bygone eras. Video games (it should surprise no one to say) have come a long way since the days of Pong and the 2600 and all the old (what we’d call “retro”) consoles. Even just the generational leap from the Atari 7800 to the NES felt like a huge step, especially when you look at the American library and the games we started with (from Super Mario Bros. on up) and ignore most of what Japan first received for their Famicom (old ports of Donkey Kong and Popeye which, while fun games, did feel very limited). There is value in seeing where we were, if for no other reason than to appreciate how far we’ve come.

The James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. series has been around long enough that games for the series could be found in just about every era of video gaming (at least from the point where games went mainstream). Everyone loves to talk about the joys of booting up Goldeneye 007 or Nightfire and, yes, those are fantastic games. But you don’t get to Goldeneye 007 without at least first realizing where James Bond had been before that and what designers had to try to do to make a good game for the franchise. We’re going to see a lot of dogs as we dig through the past of James Bond but, credit where it’s due, we actually start with a halfway decent title.

Developed by Parker Bros. (back when they used to make video games or, hell, even existed), James Bond 007 has the distinction of being the first official James Bond video game ever released (an unofficial game, Shaken But Not Stirred, also existed, but it was unlicensed and technically shouldn’t count). It was released across a bevy of consoles for the era – Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari 8-bit, ColecoVision, Commodore 64, and SG-1000 – all with similar gameplay and graphics. It was a simpler time, a more basic time, and the video games that came out in that era had to have one simple gameplay style they could hype and use over and over again. That’s pretty much what you get with this game as well.

In James Bond 007, the titular secret agent is tasked with completing four missions (from across the Roger Moore era of the films). He has to save Tiffany Case as she floats in a pod in the ocean (as taken from Diamonds Are Forever). He has to blow up an underwater lab (alluding to events in The Spy Who Loved Me). He has to destroy satellites (kind of, sort of taken from Moonraker). And then he has to retrieve radio equipment from a sunken tanker (as per loose events in For Your Eyes Only). All of this he does from the driver’s seat of his modular car, a wondrous piece of tech that can dive, drive, and leap for multi-terrain use.

What this really means, of course, is that, as the player, you’ll take Bond in a car that can putter around in the ocean (and sometimes on land) while shooting at things (at an angle) in the air and throwing mines at other things. And you do this for four stages until the game ends. It’s pretty standard for games of the era to be short, and simple, and this title certainly is. And it’s also normal for the gameplay loop to be pretty basic which, again, this one is. But at the same time, for the era it came out and based on the kinds of games getting released, this title wasn’t really all that bad.

The mechanics of the car are actually pretty solid. It controls well in the water, which rises up half the screen. The controls are responsive and smooth (at least on the SG-1000 edition of the game) and the mechanics feel pretty fair. You aren’t just puttering in the water, though, as there will be times where you need to jump out to avoid hazards. The leap of the car is light and floaty, but predictable, and it can be controlled well so you never feel like you’re really struggling to get the vehicle under control.

I appreciated the learning curve in the game as well. The first stage (as well as the third and fourth) is set in the water, and it teaches you the mechanics of driving around and using the air and water as needed. The second stage is, largely, a road stage, and here you have to drive, shoot, and jump over pits. Because you learned the leap mechanics in the previous stage, though, you should be able to control the car fairly well across the stage. It works, actually pretty well, and I found I was enjoying these simple moments in the game.

I also appreciated that the game was broken up into stages. Stages weren’t a common thing in games of this era, where the gameplay loop was basically taken from arcade games and the point was to give you three minutes of gameplay and then have you die. James Bond 007 is twice as long (easily seven minutes of gameplay) and the stages actually makes it feel like you get real progress in the game. You’re doing things, you’re accomplishing tasks. You’re actually being something like a real secret agent. In a retro game.

Of course, considering the era and the consoles it was on, the game isn’t exactly a looker. Sprites are basic one-color jobs (in this version anyway, owing to the limitations of the SG-1000), the backgrounds are flat and uninteresting. Everything has that very old, pixelated, not pretty feel that came from the era and the hardware. Those limitations are, of course, why the entirety of the game has James Bond in his car and never puts him out of it, running around, shooting at guys. The game has to be basic because that’s all that could be done in the era.

Still, for what it could do and what could be accomplished, it does feel like a proper James Bond game. It’s hard to convey a real feel of a franchise in low-tech hardware (all those terrible Star WarsThe modern blockbuster: it's a concept so commonplace now we don't even think about the fact that before the end of the 1970s, this kind of movie -- huge spectacles, big action, massive budgets -- wasn't really made. That all changed, though, with Star Wars, a series of films that were big on spectacle (and even bigger on profits). A hero's journey set against a sci-fi backdrop, nothing like this series had ever really been done before, and then Hollywood was never the same., SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s., and SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002. games can attest to that), but the creators at Parker Bros. managed to find that right balance between the old hardware and the intent of the franchise. It’s not perfect, but for the era it was just about as good as you could get. That actually sets a decent bar for the future games to try to achieve: “actually stay true to the franchise, no matter what else you do.”

I guess now I should go back and play that text adventure, just so I can see where we really started from. It won’t be pretty. Hell, it won’t be much of anything at all, since it’s text, but a game’s a game. Still, I doubt it’ll hold a retro candle to James Bond 007. This one surprised me.