Activision anuncia un nuevo juego de James Bond

In 2006, Activision strengthen their stable considerably by taking the massive LucasArts rights and lucrative Bond license off of rival EA, but to date the industry giant has made little use of the latter. That is set to change, with Activision announcing today at the Leipzig Game Conference that a new Bond is in the works. And having paid a whopping US$70 million for the franchise, the news couldn’t come soon enough.



Unfortunately, next to nothing is known about the game, other than the fact it’ll star James Bond. With no footage or screenshots to coincide with the announcement, we can only speculate on a release date. The next as yet unnamed Bond film is currently in production and is expected to hit cinemas in 2008, although a concrete date is unconfirmed. With Casino Royale releasing on the 7th of December in 2006, we expect the new Bond film to hit December 2008 as well (film studios seem to like owning specific weekends), and the game will no doubt follow suit. Given Activision’s history with movie-licensed titles – Shrek, Spider-Man, Transformers, etc. – it is a fair assumption that the next Bond game will be inspired by the upcoming film and not be its own entity like many of the EA incarnations, such as Everything or Nothing.

The one trickle of information that was leaked alongside the announcement was developer duties. Treyarch, Beenox and Vicarious Visions will be looking after the game and given past histories, we would expect them to be split up as follows: Treyarch (PS3, X360), Beenox (PC, Wii) and Vicarious Visions (DS, PSP). Given the wording of the press release, there will be no PS2 version of the game, suggesting that by late 2008 Activision expect to have dropped that console from its major license distributions.



The Bond series has definitely had its ups (GoldenEye) and its downs (GoldenEye: Rogue Agent) over the years, but we are excited none-the-less. Hopefully Treyarch can do a better job with this than they did with Call of Duty 3 and Spider-man 3, both of which we would describe as workmanlike additions to known franchises rather than trailblazing pieces of game development. Fingers-crossed!