How The Developers Of '007 First Light' Nailed The Feeling Of Being James Bond Through Its Cars And Vehicles

As a massive fan of the James Bond franchise, my main hope going into "007 First Light" wasn't that it would have characters and plot points I recognized or have all the right bits of fan service — I just wanted the game to evoke the same emotions that the Bond movies do, to really feel like I was being Bond when playing. Luckily the game delivered those feelings in spades. IO Interactive, best known for the "Hitman" franchise, created one of the best pieces of James Bond media ever, and a big part of "First Light's" success is down to the vehicles you get to drive as Bond and how they're woven into the main story.

To learn more about the game's development, and the creation of the new DLC missions that feature the Aston Martin Valhalla, I hopped on a call with Rasmus Poulsen, the game's art director, and Dominic Vega, audio director and game director of live content/missions. "We knew from the get-go that we wanted as wide a range of driving experiences as we could manage to squeeze in the game, and of course that means everything from the unexpected to the hoped for," said Poulsen, and man did they deliver.

SPOILER ALERT: While I won't be talking about major plot or character spoilers in this story, I do spoil all of the various vehicular scenes and moments, so if you haven't played or finished the game yet, bookmark this page and come back to it later.

The first excellent car moment comes in one of the very first missions, when Bond is going through initial training to join the reborn 00 program. At a facility in Malta, Bond gets thrown the keys to a 2006 Aston Martin DBS, the same car seen in "Casino Royale" and "Quantum of Solace." It's described as "a classic" by one of Bond's compatriots, who adds it's "seen some real-life action too back in her day. Still a gorgeous drive." She's not lying — the DBS is totally banged up, covered in duct tape and zip ties.

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Bond proceeds to race around a course, smashing through boxes and jumping down staircases. Despite how realistic the cars look and sound the handling is definitely on the arcade side of things, but it's also very fun. You're encouraged to do handbrake turns and always keep the throttle pinned, and enough actual skill and good driving is needed to do well in this mission and subsequent ones.

It's not a very long sequence, with Bond quickly moving on to other parts of training, but it's a great way to get us car people excited at the beginning of the game. This particular choice of car this early on is a great nod to our outgoing Bond on the silver screen, too. Bond movies have always had car chases, but it wasn't until the Daniel Craig films that the chases really leveled up, becoming grittier and more realistic and more exciting, sometimes the most blockbuster-y set pieces in the entire movie.

A few missions later, Bond and his fellow 00 trainees have to infiltrate a chess tournament at the Grand Carpathian Hotel in Slovakia, and they drive up in a 2007 Jaguar XJ, with Bond dressed as a chauffeur. This is where the game really nails the Bond feeling, with the regular cars and seemingly mundane scenes, and it was this aspect of putting cars in the game that Poulsen and Vega enjoyed the most. "The Bond franchise is not only about the low end and the high end, it's also about the sleeper cars. It's about getting the car people to go, 'I see you,' and it's for us to go, 'we see you too.' The middle of the pack there is really exciting to me," Poulsen said.

"Each of the Bond movies, the best ones, are a cohort of bands. Think of the curation of the cast of vehicles in the movie," Vega added. "We're making an 18-hour experience, we want to make sure that the cast of vehicles gets the nod [from fans]. It gets the 'ah OK, I see what you're doing there, oh you're doing a twist here, oh it's 'Living Daylights.'" The development team was in contact with Aston Martin and Jaguar Land Rover from the very beginning, and they knew they wanted to include a big variety of cars. "There's partnerships that you have to do with Bond, right, it's not Bond without certain vehicles in the mix, but then you still always want to surprise, you want to 'and' the expectation. The player should absolutely have their fantasy met, 'and'. I think it's really nice when people in the car world notice that," he said.

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In the Slovakia scene, the player calmly drives the XJ down a winding mountain road toward the hotel. You don't drive fast, or take any shortcuts, or go off the set path; it's all about setting a scene. While driving the XJ, Bond and his crew are talking about the mission and giving you more backstory, like in a transitional movie scene. Instead of making something like this a cutscene, "First Light" lets you act it out. It's like the vehicular equivalent of a "walk and talk," if you know your movie-biz slang. You can take your time on the drive, which is especially nice now that a photo mode has been added to the game. (Everything you see in this story was captured by yours truly.) With how much of the game is straight-up action, it's really nice to have these moments of levity in between that add more depth to the characters.

Poulsen says the development team visited the JLR headquarters in Gaydon, getting tours of the heritage collection and its restoration facility, to figure out what vehicles they might want to use in the game. There was everything from classics to prototypes and rarities like the XJ220, plus things that aren't even out yet. "We walked around discussing, 'hmm, we need something that's not what gets the front page, what is it going to be?' We looked at the XJ of that particular year; it has a story of old money rather than flash, it's not so old that it's vintage, it's just in-between," Poulsen said. They pointed it out to Jaguar, saying "we want that one," and the company obliged. It is a perfect spec, too, one of the later facelifts in green over cream with those lovely five-spoke wheels.

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Another part of the game sees Bond and his mentor heading to Mauritania, with the level starting off in a kitted-out Land Rover Defender. You get to drive the SUV across the gorgeous landscape, even doing some light rock crawling, before coming upon a city built inside of a ship graveyard that's run by the pirate king Bawma, played brilliantly by Lenny Kravitz. It's again used as a conversation piece, setting up the scenes to come. Bond gets back in the Defender for another exploring sequence a little later, and after a series of events including a lot more fighting, he gets rescued with the help of a great Series II pickup.

It's not all mundane drives, though. Later in the mission that starts with the XJ, after chaos ensues at the hotel, Bond has to chase after someone who's just hopped into a second-gen Jaguar XKR. He does so by breaking into and hotwiring a Bahama Yellow 1970 Aston Martin DBS, the same model used in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (and the same color as the DBS from "The Persuaders"). There's a great moment of Bond cheekily flirting with a mysterious woman who hops into the car with him, and you're off.

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Again, it's a pre-set route, but there are a bunch of fun shortcuts like swerving into a muddy field to avoid logging trucks, jumping over canals and driving through a farmer's market. You have to avoid other traffic and contend with other obstacles, and it can actually be a little tough at times. In one climactic moment, Bond drives the car onto and over a transport truck, using it as a ramp to get huge air. Who among us hasn't dreamt of doing that hundreds of times? Adding to the fun is a great damage model, with the DBS getting really beat up by the end of it even if you try and drive safely.

The car chase ends, but Bond is immediately thrust into a firefight at an airfield, which, of course, leads to him dodging explosions to hitch a ride on an escaping cargo plane. To do so, he takes control over one of those airport stair trucks, and jumps onto the wing of the plane. Then he fights a bunch of bad guys on the wing as the plane takes off, and eventually it leads to him freefalling from the plane, avoiding debris while trying to find a parachute — and you're in control pretty much the whole time. It's awesome, and really embodies that unique Bond feeling.

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Like the "Hitman" games, "First Light" is all about using your environment to your advantage, and there's a lot of moments where a vehicle is part of that environment. In parts of the game where more baddies are arriving in cars, you can shoot at them, causing them to leak gas or oil and become easier to explode. Some vehicles can be hacked, with Bond able to set off car alarms or remotely activate gadgets like smoke screens. "Plenty of movies you see a car gadget that you never get to see [used in] the movie, so that was a little bit of a head nod there," Vega said.

The two best vehicular sequences in the game don't feature cars at all, though. Or at least not ones you're driving, since you do get to smash up plenty of others. At one point in the game, Bond escapes a gala by commandeering a garbage truck and wreaking havoc through the streets of London, and then later on he takes control of a giant mining truck and drives it through a quarry in Vietnam to, again, save his friends and escape the bad guys. While both sequences are small parts of much longer missions, they're absolute blasts to play through, some of my favorite moments of the game for sure, and they feel totally Bond. Just as you might realize, "oh hell yeah, I think Bond is gonna get in that tank" while watching one of the films, I was sitting on my couch thinking, "oh hell yeah, am I about to drive that thing?"

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Vega said the two sequences came about in very different ways, with the mine truck being more organic. "The level's getting put together, and somebody puts a prop in, and then I think there is that incentive in game development, and especially in Bond, where you just want to say 'yes' to the player. Like you're rolling downhill, and someone throws something into the snowball, and instead of rejecting it you keep going." You see a bunch of these mining trucks earlier on in the mission, the game teasing what's about to come without you even knowing it yet. "The mining truck there being part of establishing the space, the place, and then ever so slightly you go, 'guys, well, let's go,' because you embody the mind of the character," Poulsen said of the scene being thought up on the fly.

"[That's the thing of First Light] being a catered experience. It's not open world, it's not everything, it's not all the vehicles; it's a specific subset of vehicles. That means it's interesting for us, that we can lure you forward with this truck and all these things, and have you go 'ah, yeah,' you got what you wanted. Rather than have a plethora of vehicles in front of you and you go 'OK, cool, which one?' No, the one we chose," said Poulsen. "You get what you wanted, but in a way that you wholly couldn't imagine or didn't imagine — unless you're a Bond fan, of course, in which case maybe you do imagine it."

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The garbage truck, meanwhile, was a much longer road to get to. Vega talked about how resourcefulness is one of Bond's key character traits, one that differentiates him from other secret agent characters, and that's baked into the level designs from jump. Another one of Bond's best qualities is how he'll smash straight through an obstacle and keep on going. Which he does in this sequence quite a lot. "It was always in the script that he's going to get into this bin lorry in this really unexpected fashion. I think Craig embodied that, I think Brosnan had a bit of that, I think Dalton had a bit of that — put two dots on a map and draw a straight line, that's how James Bond got there, and that is a really cool moment of expression," Vega said.

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What makes the garbage truck escape especially cathartic is how the mission starts: with an upset Bond sitting in traffic in a Range Rover SV, having a conversation with his boss. You can't even side-swipe traffic, with the game displaying a parking sensor warning on the screen and pulling the car back into the lane. "It's such a Londoner inside commentary there. He's frustrated, he's been told to stand down. We stick you in a powerful fantasy vehicle like the Land Rover and you can't open it up, you're just running errands. It's putting you in that headspace," said Vega, "so when we finally put you behind the wheel [of the garbage truck] an hour and a half later it's just like go go go go through the wall!"

One thing the game doesn't let Bond drive is what would traditionally be the hero car. In fact, the game rubs it in your face a bit. In a mission fairly early on in the game, you visit Q in his lab and have a conversation in front of a covered-up car that's being worked on by robots. The car is clearly the Aston Martin Valhalla to any slightly trained eye, and Q refuses to let Bond drive it even when it gets finished. He's not even a 00 yet, of course he's not getting to drive Q's souped-up supercar, and it's being built for a different agent anyway. "It kind of puts you in the shoes of Bond," said Vega, "who's like 'I wish you'd give me this on a mission!' That's always Q and Bond's relationship, it's a bit of restraint from Q where he gives you the gadgets you need, he's not giving you the keys to the castle."

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Well, Bond will be Bond, so in one of the game's final missions, there's a scene where Bond gets those proverbial castle keys. To escape a siege on Q's lab he climbs into the Valhalla, fires up its machine guns and rockets, and does donuts around the room, killing bad guys and blowing basically everything up. You do actually get to control the car for this scene, but it's pretty brief, leading right into a cutscene that has a few comedic moments involving the car and its built-in voice assistant. It's a satisfying moment, since for hours after the Aston Martin is first seen, you've probably been thinking "man, I really hope we get to do something with the Valhalla."

The team began working on the game a little before the Valhalla was production-ready, receiving the CAD files from Aston so they could get started on it and figure out how to Bond-ify the car. "One of the artistic pillars for the project is that dichotomy between downplayed credibility and outlandish adventurous over-the-top-ness. We need to combine those two things," said Poulsen. Since the game uses a third-person camera view where you're looking forward from behind the character, and thus behind any vehicle, they decided against putting weapons in the headlights or front end of the car, where you wouldn't see them. The Valhalla has such a short, low front end there wasn't much to work with anyway. "We went with a design that would utilize the body and the shapes in an interesting way, and it made sense to put all the weaponry on the back," Poulsen said. "The principal concept artist did a bunch of designs with the CAD model, where we were experimenting with opening up the panels like a beetle or folding them in and out."

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When they sent their ideas back to Aston, explaining the why and how behind their designs, the Aston team simply gave them the thumbs up. "Rather than being like 'no actually, you have a radiator there, and this and there's pipes and the thing and the valve,' they didn't give us a hard time because I think they could see that we had tried to some degree respect the negative space and interior space and all that stuff in the car," Poulsen said. The final design features the Valhalla's rear quarter panels opening out horizontally at an angle to reveal a giant auto-aiming machine gun mounted on an arm on each side. "We got that wonderful interplay and a really playful yet rather credible sense of weapons folding out. I'm sure it wouldn't necessarily be doable like this, but [Aston] didn't have a hard time with us wanting to do that, so it was a very smooth relationship."

That couldn't be it for the Valhalla, so the "First Light" team has released a few "Valhalla Protocol" time trial tactical simulation missions as DLC that let you really wring out the Valhalla on a newly designed course, either with or without weapons and obstacles engaged. When you're using the machine guns and rockets to take down obstacles, drones and other vehicles, it's definitely more outlandish than Bond movies usually are, but it fits right in with past Bond video games and reminds me of other excellent titles like "Spy Hunter." Even in strictly time trial mode it's pretty tough to achieve one of the best time targets, since you've still got to contend with all sorts of things on the road, like ramps that you obviously will want to jump off.

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"At IO, we believe that shipping the game is the first step. We tell you the story we want to tell, but there's so much more that comes after that. We knew long, long ago that the best possible moment for the Valhalla was the climax of the techo-wizard experience. You've just done all this awesome stuff in Q lab, you see everything that Q built for you, it was always going to be racing around in donuts because you don't want to end that on a chase," Vega said. The final pursuit of the villain is very personal, so a climatic car chase wouldn't have felt right, but because the player now had Valhalla expectations from the start, Vega said they always planned to design post-launch content where you get to actually drive it.

It's a great redemption for the Valhalla, which has had a rough start to its time being featured in the Bond franchise. Aston revealed the concept version of the Valhalla in early 2019, and it originally played a bigger role in Craig's final Bond film, "No Time to Die," which started filming soon after the concept's reveal. That movie was supposed to come out in April 2020, but it ended up being delayed until September 2021 — a couple months after the production version of the Valhalla had been revealed, with a very different design and powertrain compared to the concept. In the final cut of the film, you briefly see the concept sitting in the background of Q's lab, and that's it.

As for what might make it into the next Bond movie, "First Light" could give us a little hint. In one scene when you're being escorted out of that ship graveyard by Bawma, Bond walks right past a bright blue Jaguar Type 00 concept. "Visiting the JLR design studio as a car nerd was just a dream come true, it was so cool, and we got to see the prototype of the Type 00, which was incredible," Poulsen said, "It was impressive to be there and see how that works. Walking past the clay model, it was just cool." JLR has provided Land Rovers and other cars to Bond movies for most of Craig's run, but I'm sure that its heavy involvement with "First Light" is a sign that it wants some new Jaguars to be featured in the next movies. I mean come on, can't you see James Bond driving the production Type 01? At least someone should, whether it's a villain or a Bond girl or hell, even M.

I couldn't get off the phone without asking Poulsen and Vega to tell me their favorite vehicular moments in the Bond film series, whether it be a major chase or a more nerdy throwaway moment. "I want to give a shoutout to the start of 'Quantum of Solace' just because it's so visceral and moody and cool," Poulsen said. "It's not as fun as the fun ones, it's more violent and hardcore, but damn that flows well. Or rather, it doesn't flow, it's much too staccato to flow, but ooh it's so good."

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That is a great answer, but Vega holds the correct opinion, because his favorite is also my favorite. "Mine is 'GoldenEye,' but it's also because I think the dialogue plays such a role. It's a car chase where the villain is the Bond girl, but she's not having the conversation with him, he's having the conversation with the girl in the car," Vega said, referring to Bond's passenger, an MI6 employee named Caroline who is supposed to be psychologically investigating him. "I think it's the interplay; it's like a gunfight and it's a gadget fight and it's a car chase, all with just dialogue and driving. And it's low stakes, it's just having fun on the mountains. It's such an homage to the Bond girl outrunning Bond in a casual environment."

That's just one of a few great chases in that film. "The scale is so impressive, and it's the same thing [as the game] right, you go from high-precision handling, the fantasy of being the most capable person in the world, to driving a tank through a wall," Vega said, referring to one of "GoldenEye's" best moments. "I love the goofy vehicles of Bond a lot," he added. "I love the gondolas and I love the hovercrafts. It just brings out the boyish spectacle that makes me giggle."

Boyish spectacle is the best way to put it, and that's what "First Light" really gets right. Yes, the cars and traditional chase scenes are excellent, but what makes this game feel so undeniably Bond are the unexpected moments. We've got the holidays coming up, and you've got a week before GTA VI comes out, so if you haven't played through "007 First Light" yet, there's no better time to do so than the present. Though I guess you've got all the time in the world.