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Bond is back. Well, not quite, but later this month the slick super spy will be. And not only on the big screen, either. Quantum of Solace is getting the video game treatment too, from Call of Duty: World at War developer Treyarch, no less. At a recent preview event in London we got a chance to sip dry Martinis (we didn't, we had a couple of Coca Colas) with Treyarch's Adam Gascoine, the game's co-design director, and chatted GoldenEye, annual Bond games and the lessons learned from Jason Bourne.

VideoGamer.com: It's exciting times for Treyarch at the moment. You seem to have a hell of a lot going on.

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Adam Gascoine: It is. We're really busy over there. The thing is we read forums, just like everyone else does. We've received a little bit of flak over the years so we're making a concerted effort to make sure that people know that the company is full of gamers. So we took on a lot this year. We've got three games coming out. We've got this (Quantum of Solace), Call of Duty 5 and we've got a Spider-Man game (Web of Shadows) coming out. And our team is involved in several other projects as well in Activision. We've taken a lot under our belt. But it's in an effort to really put our name on the map and say we're gamers at heart. We can make really good games. We have a format and we know how to produce a good game in two years.

VideoGamer.com: Will Quantum of Solace be the game to convince some of the doubters?

AG: Yeah I hope so. We're a very different game from Call of Duty and I think we're going to appeal to a different market and there's obviously going to be cross over because everyone who buys any game ever made has played CoD4, so there's always going to be cross over. I think the CoD5 team from Treyarch are going to get more of that question, they're going to have to answer that question. Just as a team for Treyarch I hope and I do believe that people will look at this and say, 'OK they've embraced what we loved about GoldenEye in particular, embraced what we love about Daniel Craig and they've really thought about this game as a stand alone game, not just a licensed game'. I mean a licensed game takes six to nine months to put together. We spent two-and-a-half years so we must have been doing something in that time. And we hope it really shows, and we believe it really does show in the game. There's a lot of gameplay in there.

VideoGamer.com: Would it have been better for you if GoldenEye had never existed?

AG: I don't know. I don't know if it would. I think in hindsight some would say yes, I wish it had never existed. Actually it's beneficial to us, to be honest with you, because it's like a motivator. It might turn out bad, you never know, right? But it's a motivator. You've always got this 500 pound gorilla in the room. We play it all of the time. We've got it up and running.

VideoGamer.com: Really?

AG: Oh yeah. It's a great game. We love the game.

VideoGamer.com: It's a bit old, isn't it?

AG: Yeah, it doesn't look too good right now but it still plays really well. Well the controls are a bit funky actually! We also know that's what people are expecting. We had to try and recreate what happened eight or nine years ago. Now we can't do that because nostalgia paints a much prettier picture than reality, you know what I mean? But we still played it, we played all of the games. We played Nightfire, Rogue Agent, we had all of the games up and running, GoldenEye being the one we really paid attention to. So we tried to take what it is about that game that people loved so much and we tried to make sure that we brought at least some of that across to our games so that people saw that we respected the history of the franchise.

VideoGamer.com: Is it the case that 11 years after the game came out it's time for us to get over GoldenEye and move on?

AG: Maybe. I mean it might be. I guess in that respect yeah it probably would be nice to have nothing to compare to. But you could also say the advantage is that people will look at this game and say 'oh my God! They got it! Another GoldenEye!'. And that's just going to be wonderful for us if we get that. But I think the actual content of our game does put it to bed. It is different enough. It's more about just getting those people who loved GoldenEye to move onto this new thing, to give some kind of connection between the two games. It's not a very strong connection, it's more about the intensity. The intensity and the feeling of power you got when you played GoldenEye, you really felt like you really were the biggest bad ass in the room, and you could just own everything in the room. That kind of thing we've really tried to put across.

VideoGamer.com: It sounds like it might be the Bond game that's come closest to GoldenEye in terms of quality.

AG: Well we would be very proud if we got that. And actually it does still play pretty well, it really does, GoldenEye. If you can get over the crappy graphics! But I play a lot of flash games so I don't have high standards! I don't have time to immerse myself in Metal Gear Solid 4 unfortunately.

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