007 night fire

THE LATE-NINETIES AND EARLY NOUGHTIES WERE THE GOLDEN YEARS OF JAMES BOND VIDEOGAMES. AT THE CENTRE OF IT ALL IS THE MUCH-LOVED 2002 RELEASE NIGHTFIRE. THE GAME'C CO COMPOSER, AND LIFELONG BOND FAN, JEFF TYMOSCHUK KEENLY PAID HOMAGE TO THE SERIES' ICONIC MUSIC WITH HIS OWN REFERENCE-LADEN SOUNDTRACK

- WORDS BY LIAM HEITMANN-RYCE-LEMERCIER

The dawn of the new millennium ushered in the sixth generation of videogame consoles - and with it, the peak era of James Bond interactive titles.

The crop of Bond games released across the early Noughties represented bespoke adventures, separate from the film series, with unique storylines and locations which Bond himself had yet to visit.

Among the most-beloved titles of this period is Nightfire, offering a blockbuster mashup of the franchise's greatest hits, with plot inspirations taking root in everything from Moonraker to On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

For the game's action-packed score, composer Jeff Tymoschuk took a similarly reflective approach, with playful references to many iconic soundtracks of previous Bond adventures.

Sharing creative duties with UK-based composer Steve Duckworth, who scored all of the first-person missions, Jeff invested around four months to produce the 25 minutes of music that made it to the final soundtrack. “That seems like an incredibly slow pace,” Jeff admits today with a chuckle, “compared to what I, or other people, have to deal with now. It's been a long time since I've thought about the day-to-day of working on it, but, you know, I'd been working in indie film and writing music for myself for years and I was really excited to do the game. Like, falling all over myself excited! It was the biggest thing, scope-wise, that I'd ever worked on.”