James Bond is a man of luxury. He wears the finest suits, drives the fastest cars, and his skin is Egyptian cotton. He smells like sandalwood and his pockets jingle with exotic foreign money. Every morning he wakes up next to a new porcelain starlet and washes down designer drugs with Nolet’s Reserve. The National Health Service disconnects 400 grandparents from life support every year so that the British government can afford to maintain him.
In Bond films, the outward sign of this inner luxury is products. Brands, my boy: The Rolex Submariner in Dr No, Brosnan’s BMWs, an undammable tide of Astons. It makes sense: the 20th century’s most iconic cold warrior wore capital’s symbols like his enemies might wear their Orders of Lenin—they symbolised all that he fought for. In Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s Bond fought for Sony Vaio laptops, symbolising western post-Cold War degradation better than any academic text.
007 First Light’s Bond fights for, well, a lot of things. He fights for a gleaming lineup of Omega watches, he fights for a Leica camera, he fights for glasses that I confess I only know are branded because my inbox was filled with very excited glasses company PR about it ahead of the game’s release. For most of the game? It didn’t bother me. It’s gaudy, but Bond is gaudy. It would possibly have been more bothersome if he wasn’t drenched in brands.
And then I got to Aleph, First Light’s location for its fourth and fifth chapters, and every character became inhabited by the spirit of Laura Linney in The Truman Show, dementedly singing hosannahs to the day’s sponsors even while bullets ping off the walls. The sponsor in this instance: Land Rover.
Bond and his mentor/nemesis Greenway arrive in Mauritania in a Land Rover. They explore in a Land Rover. They move around a beached ship in a Land Rover. And they always, always call it by its government name; it is ‘the Land Rover,’ never ‘the car’.
When Bond and Greenway charm their way into the good graces of the local pirate king, Bawma (that’d be Lenny Kravitz), the first thing they chat about is their Land Rover. “My men brought your Land Rover around for you,” Bawma tells them. “I assumed you’d be chow by now, so I gifted that Land Rover of yours to my bodyguard, Neenee.” Bawma might be a murderous pirate king, but he respects brands.
This is already an entirely deranged conversation, but it moves up a notch when Bawma—having taken the car Land Rover back from Neenee and returned it to Bond—warns our heroes to examine it for traps. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for Land Rover,” says Greenway in response. He says that normally. He says that in a normal human voice, like it’s a thing literally anyone in history would ever say in any situation or that makes any sense at all.
I would now like to copy and paste, verbatim, my messages to the PC Gamer company Slack as I played the next part.
Joshua Wolens (14:41): “There’s a bit in this game where everyone keeps insistently referring to the car as ‘the Land Rover’.”
Joshua Wolens (14:42): “In the middle of a firefight, being implored to ‘Go and get the Land Rover!’ Not the car, the Land Rover. I love branding deals.”
Joshua Wolens (14:46): “Oh shit.”
Joshua Wolens (14:46) [Note—here I am quoting the game directly]: “‘They took out the Land Rover’.”
Joshua Wolens (14:52): “They found a new car.”
Joshua Wolens (14:52): “It’s a Land Rover.”
It is not long before even this new (actually, old: the replacement Land Rover is a vintage model, in order to better capture the vast world of Land Rover) vehicle is destroyed. Bond and Greenway are in a pickle—hunched by the corpse of their car and out of ammo. Things look bleak. Could this be the end?
Just then, over the horizon comes Lenny Kravitz. In a Land Rover.
It is cheap. It is a cheap and tawdry thing to turn your game’s characters (who I genuinely quite liked, my well-documented opinions on Bond himself being annoying notwithstanding) into advertising mouthpieces in the middle of your story, not to mention the fact that it drives me, personally, slightly insane to attain full semantic satiation on the words ‘Land Rover’ over the course of a single level of your videogame.
It makes me feel like I have been hoodwinked. First, (if I were a real human being player and not a critic who got code) into spending $70 on an ad. Second, into getting invested in these characters who might, at any moment, undergo some kind of Thing-like transformation and reveal themselves as spokespeople for the Jaguar corporation. It’s one thing to put Bond in an Omega watch, it would be quite another if he turned to the camera after equipping it and said “Exact time for life.”
It puts me in mind of recent comments from ex-BioWare producer Mark Darrah, who floated movie-style product placement deals as a potential route out of our current microtransaction-stuffed videogame landscape. Replace MTX revenues with ad revenues, goes the logic, and you might sate the beast of capital long enough that it lets you make some interesting games again. Well, First Light gave me a glimpse into that alternate reality. I can’t say it’s one I want.
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