“Earn the number,” says the promotional tagline for 007 First Light, the first major James Bond video game released in well over a decade. 007 Legends—the last major release to feature everyone’s favorite martini-swilling superspy—came out in 2012. It featured the likeness of Daniel Craig, whose five-film tenure as James Bond would hit its apex later that year with Skyfall—then and now, the only 007 film to hit the fabled $1 billion threshold at the box office (though Amazon, the franchise’s newest steward, surely has its sights set on eclipsing that number).

Here’s another way to think about it: When 007 Legends was published, Barack Obama had just been reelected president of the United States, and Donald Trump was still incoherently ranting about his birth certificate. Neither Theresa May, nor Boris Johnson, nor Liz Truss, nor Rishi Sunak, nor Keir Starmer had ever been prime minister. The “Brexit” referendum—which led to the United Kingdom isolating itself from the rest of Europe, no Bond villain required—was nearly four years away. The Covid-19 pandemic, which rattled the entire world with aftershocks still felt today—again, no Bond villain required—was seven years away.

Why bother with a depressing geopolitical recap at the top of this video game review? Because James Bond is unique among the major pop-cultural franchises for being explicitly and inextricably tied to global politics. In 2026, when things seem so dire, the safest bet for a major franchise is escapism. But James Bond—having beaten the odds and survived more than 70 years of politics and pop culture—has emerged, battered and bruised, as a kind of cultural weather balloon, rising or falling as inexorably as the climate of his era.

Maybe that’s why it’s especially fitting that a corporation as large and inescapable as Amazon spent whatever it took to take full creative control of the James Bond franchise in 2025. Apart, perhaps, from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos is the closest thing the world had to a real-life Bond villain; facing a superspy who might theoretically oppose his empire, as 007 did against the Rupert Murdoch-esque Elliot Carver in 1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies, Bezos simply acquired Bond outright. If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em.

We don’t yet know what an Amazon-produced James Bond film will look like (though auditions for the next-gen 007 are ongoing). And that puts an unreasonable amount of weight on 007 First Light, which began development years before Amazon secured the Bond franchise outright. This is not just the first Bond video game released in the same window that a comparable blockbuster franchise, like Star Wars, dropped some three dozen games; it’s the first big Bond story told since No Time to Die provided a definitive capper to the Daniel Craig era five years ago.

Maybe that’s why 007 First Light settles on the simplest method for wiping the slate clean: an origin story. Like 2006’s Casino Royale, which signaled it was dispatching with the continuity of the previous 20 films by showing how Craig’s James Bond earned his 00 status, First Light also begins with a Bond who hasn’t yet earned the number.

But what Casino Royale confines to a pre-credits sequence, First Light extends to an entire game. The game kicks off by introducing 26-year-old Royal Navy aircrewman James Bond, the sole survivor of an incident in Iceland that marked him as a candidate for MI6’s revived Double-O program. He is cocksure enough to ignore the handler that tells him an AI has determined that striking back at his captors has a less than one percent chance of success; when he beats the odds, it’s all the proof M needs that a few very special agents can offer something an AI can’t.