How 007 First Light rethinks what 'James Bond' even means

IO Interactive's Matin Emborg talks reinventing Bond for 2026's First Light

Nine out of 10 Gamers Walking Around The Game Awards agree: IO Interactive is the team to tackle a big-budget James Bond video game. It has the cred.

For 25 years, IO has minted the Hitman series into the premiere action-stealth experience through constant twists on the formula. But there are still stakes to adapting 007 for the current console era: to escape the shadow of GoldenEye and chase the glory of Daniel Craig’s Bond run, still IO had to put a fresh spin on a 72-year-old character without just copy-pasting the Agent 47 playbook. Diamonds are forever, but streaks rarely are.

Martin Emborg, cinematic and narrative director on this March’s 007 First Light, thinks IO cracked the code. The key: avoiding the trodden past of Bond altogether. First Light isn’t a greatest-hits of movie beats (although expect plenty of Easter eggs if you know what to look for). Instead, the game is a prequel focused on a 26-year-old Bond who has only just earned his license to kill. Played by Patrick Gibson (Dexter: Resurrection, The OA), IO’s Bond is rougher, impulsive, and still figuring out who he’s supposed to be. “[First Light] is about a young man looking for purpose that finds destiny,” Emborg said.

Patrick Gibson in Dexter: Resurrection and 007: First Light

As Emborg put it to Polygon at a preview event hours before the 2025 Game Awards, the origin-story premise allows IO to stay faithful to Bond’s core traits — charm, intelligence, irreverence — while interrogating them through the lens of modern times. Historically, Bond hasn’t been a character known for introspection. In Ian Fleming’s novels and in the pre-Daniel Craig film era — from Sean Connery through Pierce Brosnan — Bond was aspirational first, psychological second. He was the man who moved through danger with an almost mythic confidence. Craig’s era cracked that surface, foregrounding vulnerability and physical toll of life in the MI6 lane. First Light seems to inherit that instinct, even as it looks further back in the timeline.

Embork describes this Bond as someone “kind of stumbling into this world,” a sharp contrast with the seasoned agent audiences are used to. The game introduces Bond before and during his entry into MI6, where he’s mentored by John Greenway, the agent running the 00 program played by The Walking Dead's Lennie James. That mentorship structure gives the story room to explore how Bond learns the rules — and, just as importantly, how he starts breaking them.

Emborg draws a clear line between the older Bonds and Gibson’s take. When a fully formed Bond jumps out of a plane, it’s a calculated risk. When First Light’s Bond does it, Emborg says, it’s more like: “That’s how I’m going to get these guys — I’m just going to jump out of the new fucking airplane.” That flirtation with invincibility defines First Light’s version of the character.

The director speaks warmly about Gibson — casually calling him “Patty” — and emphasizes the balance he brings to the role. Gibson, he says, has “a great intensity” alongside “a great sense of wit and charm.” The result is a Bond who can be genuinely funny one moment and sharply focused the next. The character may still be in flux, but IO wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to feed its Bond the perfect one-liners.

Though First Light isn’t directly lifted from any of Fleming’s source material, Embog hopes that IO’s shaggy-but-brutal approach to “young Bond” hews close to the author’s vision for the character. In a 1965 interview with Playboy, Sean Connery put the conundrum of “what makes Bond Bond” — qualities that have seen the character both admired as a masculine icon and knocked for toxic behavior — in the most elegant terms:

He is really a mixture of all that the defenders and the attackers say he is. When I spoke about Bond with Fleming, he said that when the character was conceived, Bond was a very simple, straightforward, blunt instrument of the police force, a functionary who would carry out his job rather doggedly. But he also had a lot of idiosyncrasies that were considered snobbish ... such as a taste for special wines, etcetera. But if you take Bond in the situations that he is constantly involved with, you see that it is a very hard, high, unusual league that he plays in. Therefore he is quite right in having all his senses satisfied ... be it sex, wine, food or clothes.

In Emborg’s mind, Bond is a “physical, visceral guy,” shaped by experience and violence rather than floating above it. And backtracking through his past allowed the IO team to contemporize his values. This Bond exists in a modern-day setting, and while Emborg won’t quite say “this Bond doesn’t do sex” in blunt terms, expect less of the unchecked womanizing that defined Bond in the swinging ’60s and more of the fight-to-the-death drive that powered Connery’s train fight in From Russia with Love and Craig’s stairway fight in Casino Royale. (As for this Bond’s preferred martini, Emborg simply tells me to wait and see.)

The shadow of Hitman inevitably looms over First Light. IO Interactive’s reputation for systemic design makes Bond an obvious fit on paper, but Emborg is careful to stress the differences between Agent 47 and Agent 007. “Hitman is calculated,” he said, “where Bond is a much more improvisational guy. What can we do? It’s chaos in the best way.” From the sound of it, the distinction shapes the gameplay: Bond isn’t executing perfect plans so much as reacting creatively when things go sideways. First Light seems intent on making that quality playable, letting players embody a Bond who may need to act before finding the perfect solution.

For all the consideration and dissection of Bond’s brain, Emborg also emphasizes the goal of First Light in the same terms IO CEO Hakan Abrak does talking up the future of Hitman: fantasy, fun. The team asks big questions in First Light — “What is the psychological makeup of this guy?” as Emborg puts it — but, ultimately, it’s a chance to be Bond as well.

Whether that approach plays as true to the legacy of the character will ultimately be up to players, but IO’s approach suggests a confidence that 007 can evolve without losing himself. For a spy defined by reinvention, it’s a faithful gamble.

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007 First Light arrives on PC, PS5, and Xbox on March 27, 2026.