We don’t know much at all about IO Interactive’s upcoming James Bond game, aside from the fact it’s an origin story – a fact that puts me off more than it entices me, but nevertheless we shall persist. The only named character we know will be in the game at all is James Bond himself, although it would be surprising if M and Q didn’t make the cut, and I’d expect Miss Moneypenny will be there too.
Other than that, it’s anyone’s guess. Its status as an origin story could mean villains we see die in other Bond movies may appear, but then most of the movies operate on the foundation that Bond has little experience with specific characters until he meets them or M informs him of them. Likewise, there are so many classic Bond girls who we are introduced to alongside Bond – it would be difficult to include, say, Diana Rigg’s Tracy Draco in an origin story when we see him meet and marry her in Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
The same goes for a more modern true love of Bond, Lea Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann, who we meet in Spectre and stay with through No Time To Die. Even the more casual Bond girls are new to him when the movie starts.
Project 007 Can’t Rely On Existing Characters
IO Interactive’s Project 007 Logo
As a result, aside from the MI5 staff, it’s hard to imagine any important characters from the movies featuring in an origin game. Even a recurring character like Felix Leiter is explicitly introduced to Bond in the series’ first film, Dr No. And, confusingly, is then played by seven different actors across eight appearances until Jeffrey Wright took possession of the character in Casino Royale and returned throughout Daniel Craig’s tenure as 007. Yes, we couldn’t have an important character in the games and have it make sense. Thankfully, we could have a thoroughly unimportant character feature.
You forget, especially after so long of the more serious Craig stories, that Bond is campy comedy as much as it is blistering action. And no character sums that up better than Sheriff JW Pepper, who had minor roles in Roger Moore’s first two outings, Live and Let Die and The Man With The Golden Gun. Pepper is inconsequential to the lore of Bond, yet is a fan favourite character (especially amongst the sole fan I surveyed, myself) so I would love to see him make an appearance.
It feels like IO Interactive has a harder job than it seems. We all know GoldenEye, but traditionally Bond tie-ins have not been smash hits. Though he’s an iconic character, he tends to get the job done through smooth talking, sleeping around, and bumbling into lucky breaks as much as he does through expert spying. That makes for good movies (or books, as they obviously were first), but doesn’t necessarily translate as well to video games. Add in making an origin story for a character who has most frequently been played by actors in their 40s – the youngest being George Lazenby at 29 – forcing you to be a different Bond to the one we all know, and eliminating the possibility of familiar faces returning, and this feels like an uphill task.
Sheriff JW Pepper Is An Unsung Bond Legend
This is where Sheriff JW Pepper comes in. He’s older than Bond, and therefore would be around if you aged Bond down, and they don’t know each other well enough that it would break the canon to have him feature, if you care about that sort of thing. But he’s well known enough that it would give Bond fans something to ‘Leo meme’ at the screen about, in a way you can’t really do with the rest of the cast.
In Live and Let Die, made at the height of the Blaxploitation movement, Bond travels to Harlem to investigate a series of murders. This leads him out to Missouri, where he commandeers a speedboat after escaping being eaten by crocodiles, which leads to a 15 minute speedboat chase. He is mistaken for a criminal by the local Sheriff (JW Pepper), who chases him on land by racing alongside the river in his underling’s car after his own is totalled.
Again, I cannot stress enough that these stories used to be so much sillier.
Messily chewing tobacco, he brags that his family owns the fastest speedboat in the country… only for Bond to wreck his own boat and happen to steal the Pepper family boat. As Bond is pursued on water by the Harlem gang and on land by Pepper, he smashes through a wedding and destroys an ineffective police barrier, before eventually leading the gang to Felix, who informs Pepper that Bond is actually a British spy, which causes him to almost faint.
In the next movie, Bond is in Thailand hunting Christopher Lee (who, for no real reason, has a third nipple), and has to steal a rental car to chase him down. Who is driving said car? Why, a holidaying JW Pepper, who only moments ago was pushed into the river by an elephant for being rude to a street urchin of course. This time, Pepper knows Bond is an agent and roars his support – again, while messily chewing tobacco – and is part of the greatest car stunt in Bond history, paired with the worst sound effect in all of cinema.
Since Pepper is a character from the ’70s, he hasn’t aged well. In his first appearance he racially profiles a Black man (though then has Bond destroy his car with a speedboat for instant comeuppance), and in his second he uses some slurs for Thai people so dated I hadn’t even heard of them. But if you sidestep the problematic stuff – and if you’re making a James Bond game, you kinda have to – Sheriff JW Pepper has huge comedic potential.
I’m not going to know how I feel about Project 007 until I play it, or at least see it, but I’m apprehensive at the moment. The inclusion of Sheriff JW Pepper could make it all better in a heartbeat.
- Released
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August 25, 1997
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Animated Blood, Animated Violence
- Publisher(s)
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Nintendo