From there, License to Thrill became a first-person video game, minus the controller. It was both a savvy complement to Bond’s near-simultaneous video game explosion and a sly portend of filmmaking like Hardcore Henry.

Astride their motorcycles, Bond chases Thorne through the Institute, dodging errant grenades and thrown barrels. With a flick of the wrist and launch of a rocket, 007 makes an improvised escape onto a mountainside road which promptly dead ends.

Making lemonade out of lemons, Bond speeds up and jumps off the road anyway, landing on train tracks.

Thorne is still one step ahead of him, racing his bike into the back of an expectant and moving boxcar.

Feeling the suspension fighting for its life, Q butts in as he always does: “I expect you to take better care of my equipment.”

Bond shrugs it off as he always does: “Sorry to cut you off, Q, but I’ve got a train to catch.”

He steers Q’s multimillion-dollar motorcycle into the woods, up a mound of dirt, and onto the top of the train, bailing it into an ill-fated gunman and watching it explode.

“Sorry about that, Q,” he says, already trading blows with an oversized bruiser. But not to worry - there’s a fast-approaching tunnel that’s exactly two inches shorter than he is.

Safely on the other side of a hidden cut, Bond spots Thorne taking off from a flat car in a helicopter. It dangles a rope ladder, as these things are wont to dangle.

The chase continues into the sky as 007 makes the jump and holds on for dear life.

Until Thorne drops another grenade and takes a flying leap with Dr. Reeves.

The helicopter explodes and Bond falls, zeroing in on a pilot with a parachute. After losing signal and trading blows, the better man pulls the ripcord with a customary quip: “I hate flying economy class.”

But 007’s day at the office isn’t over yet. On the lake below, Thorne is making his getaway on a Zodiac boat with backup on jet skis.

Still falling albeit slightly slower, Bond draws his Walther PPK and picks off one of the trailing henchmen. He lands on the newly vacant jet ski without much trouble, then takes off.

The grand finale is a rocket duel on the high seas, until Dr. Reeves dives into the waves and Thorne’s launcher jams.

It’s all the time Bond needs to take aim with his wristwatch, moving crosshairs across his high-tech glasses.

The pièce de résistance is a POV - a warheads-eye view from the tip of Bond’s guided missile. Thorne’s realization and regret are captured in close-up and slow-motion, right before the explosion.

Everything goes black as Bond hits the water. The video feed might’ve failed, but there’s still a good enough connection for one last innuendo: “So Doctor, can you teach me how to make the Earth move?”

If any of the test subjects showed sufficient promise, they would be properly recruited at an unknown time and place by an anonymous contact with a three-word code: “Shaken, not stirred.”

Given how brief James Bond 007: License to Thrill lasted, it’s unlikely MI6 handed out too many Walthers.

The attraction premiered at Paramount parks across North America on May 9th, 1998. Kings Island, Kings Dominion, Great America, Carowinds, and Canada’s Wonderland screened it in their respective Action F/X Theaters, replacing the previous Days of Thunder ride film. The following year, it opened as a standalone attraction at the London Trocadero on August 17th and as part of the short-lived park at Fox Studios Australia on December 1st. Despite scattered accounts of it playing smaller venues with motion theaters, like the West Edmonton Mall, and M establishing the attraction as a “traveling” program, License to Thrill never made it much farther.

The entirety of the Fox Studios Backlot closed in 2001. In 2002, the Paramount parks replaced the film with Dino Island II, a generic SimEx-Iwerks production. The Trocadero location might’ve lasted the longest - its website, 007Thrills.com, survived until April 2002, when it was replaced with the ambiguous promise: Coming Soon... After several months of defaulting to pornographic spam, the homepage was salvaged: This domain has been registered for future use. It’s currently available for purchase through GoDaddy for just $17.99 a year.

It’s bizarre to consider anything associated with a brand so enduringly and internationally renowned “lost,” but it’s impossible to consider James Bond 007: License to Thrill anything but.

The only record of the preshow is a single YouTube video, shot handheld on an 1998 vacation to Paramount’s Kings Dominion. Despite the gun-barrel entrance allegedly outlasting the attraction by years, there is no publicly available footage of the Trocadero location.

The ride film itself is lost entirely, with only a few stamp-sized stills left to memorialize it. 007Thrills.com allowed visitors to watch it in full through the crunchy advent of QuickTime. Though the Wayback Machine did not archive that original file - a mere 1.4 MB - it’s always possible an enterprising fan still has it on an unmarked floppy disk.

Ride films for motion simulators never seem to die. Dino Island II continues to play regional theme parks over 20 years since its release. Elvira’s Superstition premiered in 1997 and is still going strong under an assumed name - Fright Nite - on select Mad Wave Motion Theaters.

But Bond is Bond.

There’s no telling how complex and fragile the licensing agreement was to make License to Thrill work. Deals must’ve been worked out with Dench and Llewelyn, not to mention dedicated Bond scribe, Bruce Feirstein, who wrote parts of the attraction. Landmark, Paramount, Eon, and MGM/UA all had to find common enough ground. It’s possible the contracts only covered four years, as long as the attraction ever operated. Landmark's website still identifies Bond as "one of the hardest Intellectual Property licenses to get in the world at the time." 

Though he only appeared in stock photos on the ride’s website, Pierce Brosnan retired from the role in 2002. The producers let him go as part of a course-corrective reboot, taking the series and its spywork more seriously. What to do about a one-off theme park attraction made so lovingly and lavishly the old-fashioned way?

Not much.

There will likely never be an official release of James Bond 007: License to Thrill. Unless someone digitizes their old hard drives and fast, there will likely never be an unofficial release either.

But despite occasional appearances, Bond never truly dies.

After the closure of T2-3D: Battle Across Time at Universal Studios Florida, rumors persisted that the park would finally get its James Bond stunt show. There was synergy to the idea - Universal officially acquired the international distribution rights to the franchise seven months later. Word was that Creative already had the take and the tech. All they needed was the secret agent. When negotiations fell through, they just found another one.

Besides museum exhibitions and temporary installations like 007 ELEMENTS, a Spectre tie-in housed atop the Austrian Alps, James Bond has since evaded the world of themed entertainment. But given the global sprawl of theme parks that has seen attractions dedicated to everything from Zombieland to John Wick, it’s only a matter of time.

License to Thrill didn’t last as long as it could’ve or should’ve, but take heart in the familiar promise at the end of every 007 mission:

James Bond will return.