Monolith Productions's 1960s'-inspired first-person shooter game The Operative: No One Lives Forever is a title whose legend only grows year on year.
Originally released in the year 2000, for PC, the spy-themed, gadget-filled adventure was an important project for the now shuttered Washington studio, helping to give it a win after the disappointing performance of previous Lithtech engine games like Blood II: The Chosen and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, and showing people that the company was still capable of producing titles that could turn heads for their quality as opposed to how buggy or broken they were.
At the time, it ended up taking home several Game of the Year Awards, as well as other accolades from publications of the day, but has perhaps become better known in recent years for the complicated rights issues that have prevented its rerelease on modern platforms. As a result, we thought it would be a good idea to revisit the game, looking at what the game actually is (for those who haven't had the chance to play it) and the history of its development.
In No One Lives Forever, players take control of the female secret agent named Cate Archer, who is working for the organisation UNITY to stop the Russian assassin Dmitrij Volkov and the terrorist organisation, H.A.R.M. The game featured various objective-based missions, with the player's role being to guide Archer through a number of globe-spanning locations such as Morocco, Germany, the UK, US, the Alps, and the Caribbean to prevent H.A.R.M from using biological weapons to bring the world's leaders to their knees.
While completing missions, the player would be equipped with a bunch of different weapons, ranging from a standard-issue 9mm Pistol to more powerful equipment like Assault Rifles, Sniper Rifles and Grenade Launchers. In addition to this, they would also be able to make use of an assortment of useful spy-themed gadgets, including a welding tool disguised as a cigarette lighter; a belt buckle zip chord; lipstick explosives; and a hair clip lockpick.
Whenever fans try to explain today what makes The Operative: No One Lives Forever special, two of the major things that come up are its cool, retro-themed aesthetic and its humorous writing, with the developers borrowing from a rich tradition of "spy-fi" fiction, which included, among other things, the 1960s comedy films Our Man Flint and Modesty Blaise.
Originally, we were pitching a sequel to Shogo that was going to be a kind of a different approach. It was going to be a looser sequel, not a direct one. I really wanted to get away from giant robots because that was just something that I don't think we did a very good job of in Shogo.
What you might be interested to hear, though, is that the project didn't originally start out with this spy-themed setting in mind, initially being envisioned instead as a sequel to Monolith's anime-inspired mech game Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, which had sold rather poorly but had received some positive reviews from publications at the time. That's according to Craig Hubbard — the lead designer on The Operative: No One Lives Forever, who had also worked as the lead level designer on Shogo.
"We went down a lot of stupid paths and threw away a lot of content to rush something out with Shogo," Hubbard told Time Extension in an exclusive interview about the game's development earlier this year. "And, amazingly, it was fairly well-received. The review averages were surprisingly high. So we started immediately on a new game after Shogo, but it took a while for it to end up as No One Lives Forever.
He continued, "Originally, we were pitching a sequel to Shogo that was going to be a kind of a different approach. It was going to be a looser sequel, not a direct one. I really wanted to get away from giant robots because that was just something that I don't think we did a very good job of in Shogo. It was very difficult to get that sense of scale right. So we had a concept that at one point that was called Shock Trooper that had you wearing power armor, so it was on a much more human scale.
"I think my pitch for it at the time was like instead of like being a powerful thing loose in a city, you're a powerful thing loose in a living room. It had much more relatable sense of destruction, and a much more relatable sense of scale. In any case, we were talking to various publishers at the time and that eventually evolved into something that was more like an action movie, like True Lies and that kind of thing."
You may be wondering, reading the above, how this idea for an power-armoured-themed, action-inspired game ended up evolving into the colourful and amusing first person shooter we know and love today. And, the answer to that seems to be a combination of three different factors. These include a failed American film based on a beloved British TV show, the influence of James Bond, and the impact of the publisher Fox Interactive who eventually agreed to sign the game (alongside another Monolith title, the third-person action adventure game Sanity: Aiken's Artifact).
[The Avengers] is not a good movie at all, but the aesthetic of it was awesome. I really loved that futuristic '90s meets '60s vibe to it. So I was pitching, 'What if we went more in this way, like in this direction, and give it a bit of a spy vibe?'
"I saw the the remake of The Avengers with Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman," said Hubbard. "It's not a good movie at all, but the aesthetic of it was awesome. I really loved that futuristic '90s meets '60s vibe to it. So I was pitching, 'What if we went more in this way, like in this direction, and give it a bit of a spy vibe?' Meanwhile, Kevin Stephens, the lead engineer on the game, was a big James Bond fan. So he was saying to me, 'What if we go more James Bond?' So it was like, 'OK, yeah, let's think this through'.
"Then when we started talking to Fox, it became much more like 'This is literally the '60s', instead of being just this is aesthetically '60s, which in some ways I kind of regret because it boxed us in. I love the game now for what it is, but I also kind of wanted to make the game that I originally had in mind. Though there's no reason I can't eventually do that now.
"Anyway, our producer at Fox, Chris Miller, was really invested in the project and he was part of what gave it the vibe that it had. During development, he ended up turning me on to all sorts of over the top 1960s spy-themed comedy films that I'd never really watched before. The only downside was that these were also, I think, what inspired Mike Myers on Austin Powers, which completely changed the perception of our game. Whereas that was a straight spoof, we were wanting to do something that was much more like everybody's taking it seriously except for the audience - or at least, that was the idea. So we kind of got a little bit infected by that pop culture icon, which was unfortunate timing."
One of the aspects that has been regularly praised in regards to No One Lives Forever over the last couple of decades is its choice go with a female protagonist as opposed to a simple James Bond-analogue.
Eurogamer's Rick Lane, for example, stated in 2017, "Cate's character is so fundamental in establishing the game's final tone" helping the team go from "having nothing to say about 60s' spy fiction to having everything to say about 60s spy fiction", while The Gamer's Madeline Blondeau praised Archer a few years later as "a whip-smart and confident female lead in a genre with far too few of those."
Archer, for instance, is the first woman operative ever employed at UNITY, and, as a result, is often overlooked, with the men in her department typically getting the exciting jobs, while she instead gets stuck with the more mundane missions. In fact, it's only when seven male operatives are killed on duty that she gets called into action, with her big break coming not through any recognition of her own abilities but simply the fact that her employers had run out of other people to put before her. This, of course, is meant to be an analogy for discriminatory practices in the real world and provides some meaningful substance to a game that could have just been one long gag-fest. What's interesting, though, is this almost didn't happen at all, with the initial outline for the character being a more stereotypical male protagonist.
"The pitch that I had at the time was that 'It's the guy that you call when James Bond can't get the job done.'" Hubbard said. "So it was meant to be someone much more badass. I had written a lot of sample scenes, and in it the main character is interacting with sort of the Bond girl kind of characters. And I wanted to give those interactions a twist and make them up to date and not have it be sexist in the way that it was back in the 60s. So I was playing around with that, and it just sort of hit me like, 'What if I just flip this and make the protagonist the Bond girl?'.
"The more I got into that, the more I was like, 'This is kind of scary because nobody has really done it before.' But it just felt so right, especially as we had decided on the '60s setting and it had us thinking to ourselves, 'What would it be like as a female operative in a James Bond kind of role at the time?' So it really gave me a clear design principle for the entire experience."
Despite some internal concerns over well how the project would perform, the reviews for No One Lives Forever proved to be exceptionally positive. IGN's Tal Blevins, for example, gave it a 9.1 out of 10, calling it "a shooter with a brain and a sense of humor" and praising its "excellent voice talent, "neat" gadgets, and "nifty AI". He wasn't alone in this either, with reviewers at other publications Gamespot and Computer Games Magazine also commending the title for its refreshing '60s aesthetic, witty dialogue, and enjoyable gadgets.
To capitalize on all this success, a Game of the Year Edition was released in 2001, introducing a new mission "Rest and Relaxation" and a map editor to allow players to create new multiplayer maps. This was then followed one year later, in 2002, by a PS2 port (which was Monolith's first ever video game for consoles), and a sequel No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way, that picked up from the events of the last game.
No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way begins with Cate Archer being sent to Japan to infiltrate a rumoured international crime convention, where she uncovers a plot to destabilise the world's superpowers, led by a group of new and old enemies, including The Director (the leader of H.A.R.M). As with the first game, players would have access to a bunch of gadgets to complete each objective, including new items like a telephone bug, a Mascara-shaped stun gun, and a kitten-shaped proximity mine.
"No One Lives Forever 2 was sort of a foregone conclusion," said Hubbard. "The reception of the first game had been good and we had a good relationship with Fox at the time, so they wanted more and we wanted to do more. But there was also a lot of learnings.
"We were evolving the renderer at the time and increasing the asset quality to actually build things in the proper way. That meant that content was gonna be much more expensive to build. So No One Lives Forever, I think, was like a 40-hour game probably with all the levels we built, because it was fairly basic and fairly quick to build. On No One Lives Forever 2, we had to scale way back, which I think was a mistake.
"Don't get me wrong, I think there were a lot of things that we did right on No One Lives Forever 2. There were improvements too. But then there were some concessions we had to make that I think were a step backward. Again, the game was well-received, but I have a lot of regrets about it. And I think that it deserved a little bit more than it got in terms of the final product."
After No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way, one final game in the series was released, a prequel called Contract J.A.C.K., which took place before the events of the first title and focused on the battle between H.A.R.M and another organisation named Danger Danger.
What was particularly notable about this title is that it didn't actually star the series regular Cate Archer in the lead role, but instead a male contract killer called John Jack (likely named after the former Monolith producer). This was a decision that was speculated at the time to be a desperate attempt to tap into the popularity of edgier, more "testosterone-heavy" shooters, which had begun to dominate the market.
In the aftermath of its release, the reviews for Contract J.A.C.K proved to be a lot more mixed than the previous adventures featuring Archer, with Game Informer's Andy McNamara stating, "This prequel to No One Lives Forever 2 manages to take out all the good things about the series", while Gamespot's Brett Todd labelled it, "a mediocre shoot-'em-up" and "a backhanded response to all those naysayers who found Cate Archer's adventures to be too cute". With that, the series was abruptly put to bed, with its developer Monolith Productions going on to create games like F.E.A.R, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Gotham City Impostors, and Middle-earth: Shadow of War, before being closed down on February 25th, 2025.
Today, No One Lives Forever and the other games in the series are sadly unavailable to buy anywhere online, with no one knowing for certain who owns the game's rights, thanks to Warner Brother's acquisition of Monolith Production and Fox Interactive having been bought and sold a few times since the first game originally released.
On multiple occasions, Stephen Kick, the studio head at Nightdive — a video game company known for its remasters of old properties like System Shock 1 & 2 — has expressed an interest in trying to track down the owners of these rights to remaster the games for modern audiences, but as of the time of writing, at least, the developer has seemingly been unable to make a breakthrough.
Kick told the publication VGC earlier this year, though, that he doesn't intend to "give up" on this mission and has once again expressed his intentions to try to untangle this complicated web of rights.
This is something he reiterated in a recent conversation with Shack News earlier this week, calling No One Lives Forever "number one" on his list of titles he wants to bring back from the dead.