Volkswacht Bodensee - Video games turn to classic films to woo middle-aged millenials

"I've worked on a lot of different projects, but always had an eye to Bond," Rasmus Poulsen, art director for "007 First Light", set for release on Wednesday, told AFP ahead of the game's publication.

The Dane, in his 40s, also runs a YouTube channel showing off 3D models of spacecraft from the Star Wars and Star Trek universes -- underscoring his part in a generation of game developers now turning their hands to adapting the worlds they fantasised about as kids.

With his 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 agent had not appeared in a game title for more than a decade before "First Light" -- with follow-ups to 1997 Nintendo 64 mega-hit "Goldeneye" leaving most players neither shaken nor stirred.

"First Light" is also the first game with the Bond franchise under the stewardship of Amazon, which bought studio MGM in 2022.

- Modern reboot -

Built by "Hitman" developers IO Interactive, "First Light" offers a new version of Bond's origin story, dropping players into the shoes of a cocky but callow young version of the spy still earning his stripes.

"It makes sense that Amazon’s first dip into 007 mythology should be with a game," games and culture journalist Keith Stuart of British paper The Guardian argued 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 as far as the late 1970s.

But they had their moment in the sun from the mid-1980s, with games often released alongside blockbusters' appearance in cinemas.

Frequently of questionable quality, the tie-in games felt to many players like a cash grab profiting from the movies' marketing campaigns.

By the 2000s, some franchises offered games that fleshed out or complemented the worlds depicted on the silver screen.

But data provided by Blanchet shows the genre rapidly tailing off in the early 2010s.

- Ageing gamers -

Betwen 1975 and 2011, just 547 films inspired around 2,000 games -- 10 percent of the total published over the period, he estimated.

Blanchet 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 all the greater given the doldrums the whole 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 for "Star Wars Outlaws" from Ubisoft.

That chance of success means audiences are likely to see still 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," journalist Stuart wrote.

A.Ammann--VB