IO's new James Bond game is about passion, not about commercial sales

IO Interactive is taking its new James Bond game very seriously and plans to break the long-time cycle of movie adaptation games.

Hitman developer IO Interactive has high ambitions for its new 007 game. It's the biggest project IO has ever worked on, it's built on a new-and-improved Glacier engine, and it's pretty risky; rather than follow a more tried-and-true method of commercial-based success, IO is going off the beaten path and trying something new. The result should deliver an exciting all-original journey into James Bond's past. IO doesn't want to necessarily reinvent the spy himself, but reinvent James Bond games altogether.

In a recent interview with IGN, IO Interactive CEO Hakan Abrak made the studio's motivations quite clear: They want to create a "Bond for the gaming industry."

Here's what Abrak told IGN:

"It's important to mention that this is new for us, doing a licensed game is new to us. We've only done our own original IPs, right, we've created this characters and worlds from scratch.

"So I think for us to really embrace this fully, we don't like to work mechanical, it's not just because it's a big IP, or that it's a licensed game, or that it's interesting commercially--that means nothing to us.

"We've taken a lot of commercial risks before. So for us it's about us feeling it deep inside, the passion needs to be there.

"It was very important for us that it wasn't a movie adaptation--that it wasn't a game about Daniel Craig or a specific movie where the story has already been told. It's very important that we could create a digital Bond, a Bond for the gaming industry. That's very unique, right, and the coming story to that. It's a completely original story.

"This is really important to us and we conveyed that to EON. They agreed that the result would probably be better doing the game like that.

"There's always excitement around a new Bond. It's amazing what they have done with the franchise over the years. Every Bond kind of defines a generation and it's amazing how they kept re-inventing themselves over so many years. So we're not only inspired by one movie or game, we're inspired by the whole thing. We're just sucking things into us to make an original Bond, an original story but that's also absolutely true and recognizable.

"I'm looking forward to creating a new community that the gamers can call their own, so it's not like a movie community but also a gaming community that's starting from scratch and growing together with the game we're going to create."