James Bond Producer Didn’t Want Guns In GoldenEye 007 Wii Remake, Bobby Kotick Says

It’s hard to imagine GoldenEye 007 without the silenced PP7 or Klobb, but when Activison was working on the Wii remake, a James Bond film rights holder “didn’t really want guns in the game.” This is according to former Activision head honcho Bobby Kotick, who opened up about the challenges of creating a new GoldenEye game in 2010.

Appearing on the Grit podcast, Kotick found himself in the middle of a Nintendo 64 discussion. The former Activision Blizzard CEO said that the original “GoldenEye is what actually sold the N64” and then transitioned to talking about the 2010 GoldenEye 007 reimagining for Wii. “We made a sequel, and it was a challenging thing to make because Barbara Broccoli [co-owner of the James Bond film franchise rights] did not really want anything that was violence,” Kotick said. “And she didn’t really want guns in the game.”

Kotick does believe that Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson “are great custodians for the IP.” In fact, Kotick mentioned that he understood her point about violence because kids love James Bond, but you couldn’t go that route with the expectations behind a new GoldenEye game.

GoldenEye 007 launched on Wii in 2010 as an exclusive and featured Daniel Craig as Bond instead of Pierce Brosnan in the Nintendo 64 original (which released in 1997). The FPS came to PS3 and Xbox 360 a year later with the added subtitle, Reloaded. Just over two years ago, the original GoldenEye hit Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack and Xbox Game Pass.

Hitman developer IO Interactive is working on a new James Bond game called Project 007. The title isn’t based on any movie in the franchise and will focus on a young Bond, with the aim to launch a new trilogy.