James Bond 007 on Game Boy: Saffire’s 1998 minor miracle

Set the clock back to 1998. Pierce Brosnan is right at the centre of the cultural moment: sleek, contemporary Bond films (not all equally strong) are filling cinema seats, and that fashionable new N64 has a licenced Bond shooter that’s proving a genuine hit. Your studio has secured the rights to make a Bond game as well - but there’s no reason to start celebrating yet. This one is for the Game Boy.

A Bond adventure built for the Game Boy’s limits

Two colour options. A 2.6-inch screen. And just 4MB to hold the entire game. On paper, those are dreadful ingredients for a globe-spanning espionage thriller - yet Utah developer Saffire managed to make it work. And with 007 First Light now enjoying a victorious launch, it feels like the right moment to tip our hats to what they pulled off.

James Bond 007 had no right to be as good as it was. It arrived in February 1998, only months before the more capable Game Boy Color showed up, so it had to squeeze itself into some astonishing constraints. Plenty of games responded to that era’s limitations by flattening everything into something so pared back it scarcely felt worth the AA batteries. The stand-outs, though, took a different approach: they got inventive - and this was one of them.

James Bond 007: an RPG structure with fights and shoot-outs

You’re dropped into a village in China, looking down at James Bond - all nineteen-or-so pixels of him - from a top-down, JRPG-style viewpoint reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. After speaking with villagers and nosing through their homes to pick up kit, Bond comes up against the local martial-arts master Zhong Mae. He beats her in a hand-to-hand fight, nicks her top-secret plans, and speeds off by boat to London. (Insert an Alan Partridge-esque take on the Bond theme, plus the director’s notes.) And don’t forget: four megabytes. This whole globe has been crammed into a 4MB ROM cartridge.

At heart, it’s an RPG - just one that leans heavily on close-quarters brawling and pistol exchanges to carry a sizeable chunk of the action. What really caught players off guard in ’98 wasn’t merely the combat, but the breadth: the volume of places to visit, people to meet, and tailored interactions along the way. In a single determined back-seat session on a long drive, you could be hopping from China to rural Kurdistan to the street markets of Marrakech, with a few rounds of Blackjack in the casino as a diversion.

Variety, intrigue, and ambition beyond its size

The story makes room for double-crosses and defections. The arsenal and gadgetry grows more and more outlandish. And, more than anything, the game keeps swerving between different types of play in a way that the N64’s GoldenEye could only dream of matching - let alone matching consistently.

Is it genuinely among the greatest games ever made? Those “best of all time” lists usually amount to a familiar checklist: the same classics you’ve played repeatedly, repeated tens of thousands of times across near-identical articles online. But every so often you run into a truly overlooked gem. This is one of those moments - a scrappy triumph from a studio that never quite hit the same peak again. Rampage World Tour and the completely unrelated Top Gear Rally 2 were respectable N64 releases, but neither came close to the imaginative achievement of James Bond 007.