Do You Expect Me to Talk?

A TV ad for a new console game used to be quite an event, but you have to go back a coupla years to recall one that really grabbed your attention. Metal Gear Solid, Medal of Honour, even the GTA series... and of course the Bond games like Goldeneye. One aired in a primetime slot this evening. Interestingly it's another Bond-movie game, but this is not just a new game, it's a new game based on an old movie. It's not the first game that's been spawned by a movie that predates it, but From Russia with Love is positively retro, and perhaps the first seriously retro game.

And it certainly won't be the last. Just as the DVD market, having exhausted the '1990 to current' Hollywood blockbuster catalogue, has suddenly erupted into a frenzied release of foreign, fringe/cult and softporn free-for-all, so the games industry seems set to embark on a retro-fetish that will undoubtedly make a lot of people very rich. The Eurythmics perfom 'live' on the incredibly schmaltzy UK Rock Hall of Fame, confirm this supposition: Ours is a culture moving so fast, with such exponential momentum, that it is destined to regurgitate its own until every cultural artifact we consume is a simulacrum of its former self.

So many of the Connery-Moore era Bond series are certain to follow, with tasks and levels that echo the (already spongey) plots of their namesake... Not that I'm neccesarily complaining, it's just that my PS1 is gathering dust, in storage under the stairs.