TG’s 50 greatest games of all time: James Bond 007 (Gameboy)

Picture the scene: it’s 1998. Pierce Brosnan is at the heart of the zeitgeist, with glossy modern Bond films of varying quality putting bums in cinema seats and a licensed shooter for that newfangled N64 proving quite popular. Your game studio has acquired the rights to make a Bond game too, but you’re keeping the party poppers in your drawer. Because this one’s for Gameboy.

Available colours: two. Screen size: 2.6 inches. Available data to write your entire game onto: 4MB. These are not the ideal specifications for a globetrotting espionage thriller, but Utah-based Saffire found a way. And for that, on the occasion of 007 First Light’s triumphant release, we salute them.

James Bond 007 simply had no business being brilliant. Released in February 1998, just a few months before the more advanced Gameboy Color arrived, it had to work within incredible constraints, which many games responded to by simplifying all elements to such an extreme that they barely seemed worth the AA battery spend. The best games had to get extremely creative, and this was one of them.

You begin in a Chinese village, peering down at all nineteen or so pixels of James Bond from a top-down JPRG-like camera perspective similar to the one The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening uses. After chatting with the local villagers and snooping around in their houses for equipment, Bond meets local martial arts master Zhong Mae and defeats her in hand-to-hand combat, steals her top secret plans and makes a speedboat escape back to London. (Cue the Alan Partridge-ian Bond theme rendition and director notes). And remember: four megabytes. This whole world lives within a 4MB ROM cartridge.

It’s an RPG, really, albeit one that relies heavily on melee fisticuffs and pistol shootouts to fill a lot of the content. But the number of locations, characters and bespoke interactions was what really blindsided gamers in ‘98. In one determined backseat road trip play session, you were jetsetting from China to rural Kurdistan to the Marrakech street markets, pausing for a few games of Blackjack in the casino.

There’s double-crossing and defection. There’s an increasingly preposterous array of firearms and gadgetry. And, above all, an unpredictable variation in gameplay that N64’s GoldenEye wishes it had a fraction of.

Is it truly one of the greatest games ever? When you read lists of such things, you’re generally scanning a checklist of titles you’ve played many times and which appear 50,000 times in other very similar articles internet-wide. But how many times do you happen upon a real unsung hero? Well, this is one of those times. An underdog story from a studio who never quite achieved such a feat again – Rampage World Tour and the entirely unaffiliated Top Gear Rally 2 were decent N64 outings, but they weren’t a creative feat of James Bond 007 proportions.