The James Bond theme is untouchable. That guitar riff and orchestral swell have become synonymous with espionage itself, instantly recognizable whether you're watching Sean Connery or sitting down with a video game controller. So when The Flight, the composer duo behind Gotham Knights and Assassin's Creed Shadows, took on the challenge of scoring IO Interactive's 007 First Light, the question loomed large: how do you build an original score around such a monolithic piece of pop culture?
The answer, surprisingly, came with almost no restrictions at all. Joe Henson and Alexis Smith, who make up The Flight, sat down to discuss their creative process on the game, and what emerged was a portrait of a team given remarkable creative freedom by IO Interactive, aside from one core instruction that shaped everything.
"The main thing from IO Interactive was to hold back those big orchestral moments to give it to the player when he's earned it," Henson explains. "Other than that, we weren't being pushed into any boxes. There definitely wasn't a style guide that came in from outside saying, 'This is how you should use this.' Sonically, how we used that main theme, there weren't really any rules."
That directive, deceptively simple, became the north star for the entire project. Rather than carpet-bombing the game with Bond's iconic melody, The Flight learned to treat those orchestral peaks as rewards, moments of triumph that would land harder because they arrived at exactly the right time.
Building a Modern Bond Sound
The composers tackled the score by first establishing a sonic identity for different locations within the game. "Bond is brass, Bond is strings," Smith says. "But we, being The Flight, are always trying to push modernity as well because this is a modern take on Bond. So we've got to use electronics, use synths and stuff like that in a tasteful way."
It's a balancing act between reverence and innovation, honoring decades of Bond film scores while injecting contemporary production techniques. The Flight worked directly with Lana Del Rey and David Arnold, who created the game's theme song, to ensure that melody would echo throughout the narrative rather than disappear after the opening credits.
"We used Lana and David's song at very specific emotional points," Smith says. "The first time you hear it is very early on. It's kind of Bond's rebirth. It looks like he's dead. Then he is reborn." Henson adds that the theme returns at other pivotal moments, including the player's first kill and at the game's conclusion.
Growing up in the 1980s watching Timothy Dalton's Bond films, Smith and Henson developed their appreciation for Bond's musical legacy, but it was the 1995 GoldenEye theme, performed by Tina Turner, that cemented their devotion to the franchise. "It came out just as I was coming into the music industry," Smith recalls. "It's a big song that still sounds so good. It still sounds modern. You could play it in a new Bond film and it would be absolutely fine."
That timeless quality became their target: a score that feels contemporary yet unmistakably Bond.
Creating music for a game presented its own complications, distinct from film scoring. "A game score is much longer an experience than a lot of films," Smith notes. "So you need more of everything. It's very difficult to string out just the Bond theme throughout all that music. It would get boring and you definitely don't want to overuse that Bond theme that everyone knows."
According to Smith, between 50 and 60 percent of the score is interactive, shifting and evolving based on player actions, from stealth sequences to explosive set pieces. IO Interactive's hybrid approach to 007 First Light, which alternates between open playgrounds and cinematic scripted sequences, required a corresponding flexibility in the music itself.
The Flight's unusual path to video game scoring shaped their approach. "We didn't train at a film school or anything like that," Smith explains. "We started as musicians making dance music, being in a band, making pop music. So we came into working on games from that angle and learned the orchestral language along the way." That background in electronic and pop music informs their willingness to blend classic orchestral Bond with modern production, creating something that sounds fresh without sacrificing the legacy.
Still, the weight of the Bond franchise looms large. "Obviously we have a big responsibility to the Bond score," Smith says. "It's always got to sound like Bond."
Author Emily Chen: "The Flight's restraint with the iconic Bond theme is smarter than flooding the game with it every five minutes, and their honesty about working from a pop music foundation rather than film school makes their orchestral chops all the more impressive."
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