This week, we look at the release of 007 First Light, widely hailed as a triumphant return to videogames for James Bond. We talk to IO Interactive's senior combat designer, Tom Marcham, who tells us about emphasising player creativity and agency, and taking a "Batman approach" to lethality.

Next, we turn to Japan. Alan Wen reports from BitSummit, where he met with Indie Game Incubator's co-founder Takaaki Ichijo to discuss his decade-long effort to support the indie scene in the region, and why this particular event isn't always quite what it seems. 

007 First Light released on Wednesday to positive reviews and went on to sell over 1.5 million copies within 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling title in IO Interactive's history. The production was a labour of love, from a team dedicated to delivering a new kind of James Bond experience. 

"James Bond very rarely does what you're expecting," senior combat designer Tom Marcham tells Knowledge. "He's this globetrotting adventurer, always going to different exotic locations, and then there's this spycraft and gadgetry, which has become iconic… And when you take it away, you start to lose some of the uniqueness of the franchise. Those were the main things we knew we needed to get in." 

From the moment the game was announced, comparisons with IO's Hitman franchise were unavoidable. It wasn't until previews arrived that players finally understood the studio's vision – that, despite being uniquely positioned to tackle the iconic agent, IO built its Bond very much in opposition to Hitman. 

"There always was this methodology from the moment I joined that [we] didn't want to make James Bond into Hitman," Marcham says. "And there was this love for the franchise that meant that [the team] knew that it would be almost dishonest to do that. It might meet the expectations of some Hitman fans, but it wouldn't meet the expectations of those coming for a James Bond experience. With that came a ground-up approach to everything." 

IO rebuilt its tech specifically for First Light. Marcham mentions in particular having to work on higher-fidelity movement, to make sure IO's Bond would move in a characteristic way – away from Hitman's "stiff, wooden assassin" walk and towards movement that's "stylish in every moment and has loads of flourishes." 

Marcham acknowledges that it's hard to put a finger on precisely what can convey "Bondiness" – the concept isn't set within rigid boundaries and required a lot of trial and error.  

"Sometimes you sadly don't know that it's wrong until you see it. A lot of the time we would try something, and then just go: 'This doesn't look like what James Bond would do'. You often think that you'll find some hard-and-fast rules you can work with, but I don't think we ever found them.  

"Instead, what we found was that you know when it's right and you know when it's wrong – and that became the way we worked."

First Light is an origin story, focusing on the events that formed James Bond. The game makes good use of his freedom to kill, but with a unique twist setting the game firmly apart from previous Bond games and traditional shooters: the game's 'License To Kill' mechanic limits the player's ability to be lethal. You can only kill enemies who have raised weapons first.

"It is an element that comes directly from the character, right?" Marcham points out. "He won't walk into a room and shoot a civilian. He won't even walk into a room and necessarily shoot a bad guy as his first resort. He normally goes about it in a smarter way. And we wanted players to do the same thing. It also ties into where he is on his journey as a character: he's maybe not so ready to pull the gun yet. This is him right at the start of his career, so he's still dealing with the consequences of killing people.

"We explore that within the game itself, and the Licence To Kill mechanic is a way for us to tie the two together – the character, the narrative, but also the gameplay objectives that you'd expect an agent from MI6 to be operating under. But I think it's also important for us that, when the guns do come out, it's very explosive. We've built that pacing into the gameplay."

Bond in his traditional incarnation isn't quite the killing machine previous videogames have portrayed him to be, often killing fewer than ten people per film. Compared to shooters where players often kill dozens of enemies in a single level, the parameters are certainly different. We ask Marcham about making combat exciting without it seeming out of place.

"The Licence To Kill mechanic is obviously a part of that, but then there's also just building out the other elements of the world – entire social systems, gadgetry, and then also close combat, which is very themed around a lack of lethality. It's still quite brutal, but we go for a Batman approach to lethality, where he'll often take someone out non-lethally rather than just ending them. There's even mechanics you can use within the gun sections to keep people alive, even though you're firing at them.

"So you can play around with the level of lethality, and how much you choose to avoid conflict. But a core element of the character, I think, is that he does kill. He's someone who genuinely believes you can shoot your way to a better world, which is inherently an interesting idea to explore. What that means – what character that makes him, and how the world responds to that – is interesting."

Figuring out what feels right for Bond also applied to designing First Light's gadgets, which Marcham says was one of the hardest development challenges.  

"That was the place where it seemed the most free at first, but we quickly found that a lot of gadgets don't actually feel like James Bond gadgets. We had a few failed prototypes where they ended up feeling like he had the Force," he laughs. "You have to get the tech level right. There is a perception of how technical James Bond gadgets should be, and they have to stay within the realm of realism, so we had to find where that line was. And then there's a level of impact to them, that generally you want them to work across multiple scenarios." 

He notes that, in the movies, the gadgets are used sparingly, and often in unexpected ways.  

"The only thing we could really take from that was that you should be able to use them for things that you don't immediately think, 'That's what it's for'. And then, on top of that, we had to make sure that the level of usage was right. If we went too far, it'd stop feeling like Bond and start feeling like 'gadget man'.  

"So we had to go through a lot of iterations to nail those down to find the tech level and make sure they were fun within the game. The moment we knew we got it right was when players started doing unexpected things with them." 

Marcham shares the team's pride in having created novel approaches to combat, prioritising player agency. As we discuss how he'd define success for First Light, this is one of the things he hopes sticks. 

"I think we've done some really cool things, especially around the transition between melee and ranged combat, and some of the creativity you can have in the middle of a gunfight. I would like to see other franchises or designers take that further, or take inspiration from that in the future. That, to me, would be like the coolest thing.  

"And then, as for the game itself, I hope it becomes the Bond game people think of for the next ten years. There've been so many good Bond games before, but I don't think any of them have actually been able to capture all of the elements of the character. I'd like that to be the thing that people think about this game for years to come."

Takaaki Ichijo was working as a salesman for Japanese middleware company CRI when he first discovered Unity, which had established its Japanese subsidiary in 2011. At first, it was his job to try to sell his company's products to the engine-maker: "It was when I started trying Unity that I then realised I could make my own games with this engine, so I quit my job!" 

He eventually used Unity to make and release his own game, Back In 1995, a 3D action adventure game that was a tribute to the low-poly survival-horror games of the PS1 era. 

Released on Steam in 2016 and consoles later on, it was, for Ichijo, "a small hit" considering he was a solo developer. Yet the experience also left him burned out. "I felt a lot of difficulty doing everything as an indie developer in Japan," he explains. "So, rather than continuing as an indie dev, I started to support other indie devs, from friends to upcoming devs." 

Ichijo may not be well known outside of Japan but he has played a crucial role in his country's growing indie game dev scene. He was the author of the book The Indie Game Developers Survival Guide, and helped start up community events such as Tokyo Indies. In 2021, he co-founded Japan's first incubating program for indies, Indie Game Incubator (IGI), based on GameBCN's incubation program model, and supported by Japanese publisher Marvelous. As of 2023, this model has also been adopted by the government-funded game acceleration program So-Fu, for which Ichijo also advises.  

IGI has already seen success with alumni including Nao Shibata, the solo developer of Ninja Or Die, whose recent release Berserk Or Die was published by Vampire Survivor creator Poncle, as well as Kotake Create, creator of The Exit 8 (which was actually working on another game during the incubation program). So-Fu alumni behind the games Finding Polka and Mount Lomyst were also among the prize winners at BitSummit, Japan's largest indie game festival, which just concluded its 14th edition last weekend with a record-breaking 68,000 attendees. 

It's interesting to view Ichijo's achievements in the Japanese indie dev space alongside BitSummit's exponentially growing popularity. Yet while IGI is among the sponsors of the Kyoto-based festival, where its graduates also have a booth to showcase their games, when we meet with Ichijo at BitSummit, he has a more stark view of how the event represents the Japanese indie game dev community. 

"BitSummit will say they started a Japanese indie event and are the Japanese indie scene, but I don't believe that," he says. "Of course, it's a great event, and anyone can join it, and you can find lots of great games there, but it is an international event with international developers." 

It's a potentially controversial perspective, not least given that the game industry has always been extremely international in nature. But Ichijo also considers 'indie' "a word that was imported from overseas," overlooking the history and culture of hobbyist game creators (or 'doujin') that have existed in Japan since the 1980s. For instance, one of the most successful doujin games is Cave Story, created by Japanese solo developer Daisuke 'Pixel' Amaya in 2004, which preceded the release of Braid by four years but is often overlooked when discussing the rise of indie games as we know them today.

There is of course a difference, in that 'doujin' developers tend to make games out of their own passion alongside day jobs, whereas 'indie' is increasingly viewed as a business model, albeit one with more individual creativity than triple-A allows. Ichijo isn't necessarily saying one is better than the other, but he wants local developers to have that choice. "A new student team making their own game to release on Steam might wish to become a company to get more funds and connect to the international scene, but if they just want to be hobbyists, Japan has another way to continue their creativity," he says. "The developer can choose both or a mix." 

What Ichijo finds frustrating is that there are opportunities available to western developers based in Japan that aren't accessible to local developers, but are still considered part of the Japanese indie scene. "I feel BitSummit or any other event or award run by foreigners is from their friends' circles rather than related to the actual Japanese indie scene," he continues. 

Even while the indies chosen for official selection at BitSummit cover a diverse range of creativity, Ichijo also criticises their location – away from the shinier sponsors' booths, in a small, dimly lit space, with rows of small tables bunched up together. He points to Taipei Games Show as an example of a better model, where half of the space is reserved for domestic developers, and recommends the Digital Games Expo held in Akihabara as a place for the "real" Japanese indie scene. 

Nonetheless, there are improvements across the region's indie movement as a whole. Japanese indie publishers continue to grow in number, joined recently by Toei Games, from the animation giant behind Dragon Ball and One Piece. Meanwhile, just ahead of BitSummit, Square Enix announced a new game contest for residents in Japan, with a total prize pool of ¥1bn ($6.2m), contrasting with the Square Enix Collective headquartered in London, which Ichijo had bemoaned as an indie initiative that was not open to developers in Japan. 

"Ten years ago, Japan didn't have a choice in connecting with the western world, but I, along with friends, have built an incubation program, written books, made events, and that bridge is getting built," Ichijo says. "My motivation for running programs like the incubator and government accelerator is to give the same opportunity and know-how to Japanese developers as those in the western world."

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