Tomorrow Never Dies: The Mission Continues

In 1998, when Tomorrow Never Dies was released on VHS, at the end of the film, a short video was included as a special feature. The video itself featured Desmond Llewellyn, who played the role of Q from 1963 to 1999, announced that MGM Interactive was developing a video game based on the film, was going to be released later that year on PlayStation and Windows PC. The title was actually not going to follow the film's storyline, but was going to feature a brand new plot serving as a sequel to the 18th James Bond film, entitled Tomorrow Never Dies: The Mission Continues. Not much of the plot was revealed, but it followed James Bond as he investigates Satoshi Isagura, a terrorist slightly connected to Elliot Carver's deadly plans, and by the looks of it, he was going to takeover his myth and spread the deadly threat all over the world.

However, the game has passed through several verses as at first it was being developed as a First-Person Shooter game, paralleling the success of Rareware's GoldenEye 007 video game that was released a year prior to this announcement.

The early version of the development featured a creative HUD, such as the healthbar was modeled as a gunbarrell. Each time the player was shot, a blood poured down through the circular gunbarrell, and when the healthbar filled completely in red, the player as usual would have died.

Using the same engine, MGM Interactive decided to adapt the game in Third-Person Shooter aspect, featuring many interesting and spectacular levels such as skiing in Switzerland, swimming under the deep Mediterranean sea, which personally reminds me of a Tomb Raider video game, then having Bond driving his BMW Z3 Roadstar in attempt to stop a terrorist attack. After making slight changes, it appears that they left the same HUD as it was in the First-Person Shooter project. It also featured many classic gadgets making their comeback to the screen from the previous films, such as a mini-rocket hidden in 007's ski-sticks, mirroring the pre-title sequence from The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977, the same misused car from GoldenEye which made a brief appearance in the film had a longer screentime in this project, armed with many gadgets and weapons by Q-Branch.

When MGM Interactive failed to impress the audience, the whole project ended up being cancelled, as the rights was provided to Electronic Arts. To make an impressive action flick, many of the elements from The Mission Continues are survived and were added to the film's own storyline, with the project reverting back to making a direct video game adaptation of Tomorrow Never Dies, using the same game engine, completely redeveloped by BlackOps Entertainment exclusively for PlayStation, it featured a level in which Bond used a BMW 750il to pursue and prevent a terrorist smuggling weapons through the Swiss borders, something that was present in the original game adaptation. But, the final release showed no scuba-diving levels as seen above. And also, the HUD completely differed than it was in the previous attempt.

Apart from its objectives, the driving level completely differed from the one present in The Mission Continues, as Bond's car was changed from BMW Z3 to BMW 750il, and even the timing completely altered as the original level took place in a daylight time instead of a midnight chase.

As a conclusion to this article, Tomorrow Never Dies: The Mission Continues is a video game that is actually going to be missed, because it was going to be a great Bond experience to the fans. However, EA's final release version was not a complete success we expected, and after what we saw with GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64, this game is full of disappointments. It could have been a lot better if it was done right. But, it still remains a great game compared to the most godawful titles made by Activision under Bobby Kotick.