EA James Bond Veteran Cites Batman: Arkham Asylum As ‘Exactly What We Should Have Done’ With The License

Chuck Beaver, who worked Electronic Arts’ 007: Nightfire, 007: Everything Or Nothing, and 007: From Russia With Love in the 2000s, has admitted that Batman: Arkham Asylum is what the team should have tried to achieve with the Bond license, believing the Dark Knight is basically 007 in a cowl and cape.

Speaking with FRVR, Beaver noted that EA’s trilogy of Bond games proved a challenge to make due to inevitable comparisons to GoldenEye on Nintendo 64, which up to that point was the gold standard for 007 video games. While the team were afforded some “creative freedom” with Nightfire and Everything or Nothing as they weren’t based on an existing Bond movie, From Russia With Love was the most difficult due to it being based on the film of the same name. Not only that, but it saw original 007 actor Sean Connery reprising his role as the British secret agent for the first time since 1983’s Never Say Never Again (which was a remake of Thunderball).

“The James Bond films are not always a good match for single player missions because a lot of this stuff is happening very subtly,” he said. “It’s not all gunplay, you know what I mean? It’s all spy play and not all of that is on the controller… that was a challenging one to do.”

We gave the license up to Activision after From Russia with Love and we were like, ‘oh, sorry, we would have loved to perfect it’.’ And then, I remember Arkham Asylum came out – not shortly after, but after – we were like, ‘oh, that’s exactly what we should have done for that’. That was so good. But it was like, Batman is Bond in a cape and cowl. It was so fun to watch them nail the essence of that.

It wouldn’t be hard to make a 007 game now because you have a lot of good examples of how to, gameplay-wise, do what happens in those movies. I thought Arkham Asylum was like: ‘Oh, that’s it. That’s it. That’s how to do that.’ And then now, they’ve got even more to go with. You could pull in, you know, Snake from Metal Gear Solid kind of gameplay.

The Bond series continued under Activision with a number of projects including Quantum of Solace, GoldenEye 007, Blood Stone, and 007 Legends. The video game franchise is finally getting a revival later this month courtesy of IO Interactive’s 007 First Light, which is an origins story for the character.

[Source – FRVR via VGC]