The New Omega "007 First Light" Seamaster: A London Tailor's Take On The “Video Game Bond Watch”

A client of mine, one of those guys who can talk about lug-to-lug measurements for forty five minutes while I'm trying to pin his trouser hem, messaged me earlier this week and said "Roberto, have you seen the new Bond Omega? It's from a video game." Now I’m highly aware that the new Bond game 007: First Light comes out this week (as I write this I am waiting for my now late pre-order to arrive so I can start playing!) so I didn’t immediately think he was having me on.

But the last time James Bond and a video game collided in my world was when I was about 18 years old, it was GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, and I was getting absolutely battered in four-player split-screen by mates who always picked Scaramanga because of that whole one shot and your dead Golden Gun nonsense. Cowards. If you know, you know. That game was a sleep stealer for sure!

But lo and behold he was right. There IS a brand new Omega Seamaster, a proper one that costs the best part of eight grand, and it was designed for a video game before it was ever designed for your actual human in the real world wrist. So naturally last night as we sweltered in 30 degree heat, I went down a deep rabbit hole because I've got a YouTube channel, a blog and a podcast and apparently an obligation to do this to myself. And since so many of my tailoring clients are serious watch enthusiasts, I figured it was worth writing the whole thing up properly, from a slightly different angle than all the watch blogs - because I'm a clothes person before I’m a watch person, and the more I’ve looked at this the more I have to say.

First Things First, It's Not Called The "Divemaster"

Let me clear something up straight away because it's already been doing my head in. A lot of people, including some who've messaged me, have been calling this thing the "Divemaster First Light", and I completely understand why because that sounds right and sounds exactly like the sort of name Omega might give a diving watch. But there's no such thing as an Omega "Divemaster". It doesn't exist! The watch is officially called the Seamaster Diver 300M Chronograph "007 First Light", which is a mouthful, and the "First Light" bit isn't some romantic nod to the breaking of dawn over the ocean horizon, it's literally the name of the video game it was made for. So if you've been searching for a "Divemaster" and coming up with nothing, that's why and now you can be the unbearable one at dinner parties who corrects everyone else. You're welcome.

Right. Now we've sorted that out, let me tell you why I think this is one of the most - to me anyway - intriguing watches Omega has put out in years, and why it tells you something interesting about where luxury is heading.

Why Bond's Watch Came From A Game And Not A Film

Here's the bit that made me sit up.

For thirty years now, ever since 1995, every single Bond Omega has come off the back of a film (even if it's not explicitly named after the film). It all started with GoldenEye, when Pierce Brosnan strapped on a Seamaster because the costume designer, the wonderful legend that is Lindy Hemming, reckoned a Royal Navy man would naturally wear a diver. And the formula's been the same ever since. There's a movie, there's a watch, the watch is on the wrist on the big screen, half of us instantly want it, a lucky few buy it. That's been the way of it for three decades, and it's been an absolute money spinner for everyone involved.

Except right now there's a rather big problem. There isn't a film.

Daniel Craig hung up the tux after No Time To Die in 2021 and since then it's been radio silence, no new Bond announced, no confirmed movie, no release date - we only have a screenwriter and director in Stephen Knight and Denis Villeneuve respectively. The whole franchise is sitting in a waiting room with no idea of a timeframe. And if you're Omega, and your most lucrative storytelling partnership in history suddenly has no story to tell because there's no film coming, what the hell do you do?

The solution they came up with is quite clever, whether or not you love the result. They basically decided that if Bond won't come to the cinema, they'll go meet the audience where it resides now, and a huge chunk of that audience, especially the younger end that every luxury brand on earth is desperate to reach, is sitting in front of a console with a controller in its hands.

So this watch was created for a game called 007 First Light, made by the studio behind the Hitman series, who reportedly poured something like a hundred million dollars and seven years into it. That's not a cheap little tie-in, that's a serious piece of work. And the premise is brilliant - it's a young Bond, twenty six years old, before he's the immaculate operative we all picture, when he's still reckless and rough around the edges and earning his licence to kill. "First Light" is about the dawn of the legend, the moment before sunrise on the whole Bond mythology.

And the detail I loved, as someone who obsesses over why things are made the way they're made, is that Omega didn't just hand the developers an existing watch off the shelf. They were brought in early, and the watch and the game were designed almost hand in hand. The little heads-up display in the corner of the screen actually echoes the layout of the watch dial, and the warm bronze-gold ring on the sub-dial, the one bit of colour on an otherwise quite moody black watch, was put there deliberately so it'd read clearly on screen. So the watch you can buy and wear was, in a funny way, reverse-engineered out of a 3D model that lived in a game first. The digital came before the physical, which I find both a little bit mental and a little bit wonderful at the same time.

So What Is It, In Plain English?

Let me try and describe the thing.

It's a Seamaster Diver 300M, which is the classic Bond shape we all recognise with the wave dial, the skeleton hands, the helium escape valve at ten o'clock that ninety nine percent of owners will never need but which makes you feel like a deep-sea diver while you're actually just sat in traffic on the A41.

But here's the headline - this is the first time in the entire history of Bond's Seamaster that it's been a chronograph, a watch with a stopwatch built in. Thirty years, loads of Bond watches and not a single chronograph until now. That's a historic first and I'll come back to why this matters later.

The case is stainless steel, forty four millimetres across, and, deep breath (sorry couldn’t resist), 17.2mm thick. Hold that number in your head because it's the single most controversial thing about this watch and I've got a bit to say about it. The dial is polished black ceramic with the laser-engraved waves, the Seamaster name picked out in red, and then the bronze-gold ring on the chronograph counter with a matching central seconds hand, which is the watch's visual signature. Inside is Omega's Co-Axial Master Chronometer Calibre 9900, which is absolutely one of the best automatic chronograph movements being made by anyone at any price, sixty hours of power reserve, certified to within an inch of its life, and resistant to magnetic fields you'll only ever encounter if your hobby is loitering next to industrial MRI machines.

On the back there's a sapphire window with "007 First Light" printed on the underside of the glass, which I appreciate, they didn't tastelessly plaster it across the front, and it comes on a black, grey and beige fabric NATO strap with "007" on the titanium buckle. No metal bracelet, which raised a few eyebrows at this price, but I'll get to that.

The price is £7,900 in the UK, around $9,400 in the States. And crucially, and I cannot stress this enough, it is NOT a limited edition. No number on the back, no "one of ten thousand and seven" like my 2006 Casino Royale Seamaster… they'll make as many as people want to buy. Hold that thought, because it's probably the most important fact in this whole piece when it comes to the question everyone really wants answered.

Where It Sits Among The Great Bond Omegas

To understand this watch you've got to understand the family it's been born into, because Bond Omegas are a whole world of their own and some of them have been absolute masterpieces.

The one everyone points to as the gold standard is the Seamaster 300 SPECTRE from 2015. That one was a genuine limited edition, seven thousand and seven pieces, and sold out almost instantly. It cost about $7,500 new and today it changes hands for somewhere between $10,000-12,000, sometimes even more. So people who bought it just to wear it will, more or less by accident, make a tidy profit if they ever come to sell theirs. Then there's the one I mentioned earlier, my Casino Royale edition from 2006, the Quantum of Solace one, the titanium No Time To Die piece that Daniel Craig himself helped design, the sixtieth anniversary editions and so on.

Once you line them all up, a really clear pattern emerges. The Bond Omegas that have shot up in value are the numbered limited editions, the ones with genuine scarcity, where only a certain number are made and once they're gone they're gone. The ones that have just about held their value, or even dipped a touch below retail are the open editions, the ones made in whatever numbers the market dictates.

This new 007 First Light? Absolutely in the second camp. Unlimited, open production - as many as you like. So as a piece of Bond history it's totally fascinating and it's a real milestone, but it’s not commercially set up to be the next Casino Royale or SPECTRE. It sits much more alongside the No Time To Die edition and the sixtieth anniversary one, lovely watches that might hold their value but aren't the ones collectors looking to make a mid-long term profit circle like sharks.

What The Experts Think, And Where My Thoughts Are

I have read pretty much everything written about this watch so far - articles in Hodinkee, Fratello, Monochrome, Time and Tide, Esquire, Top Gear of all places, plus skimmed through several hundred comments from grumpy men on the internet, which is a whole category of entertainment all on its own. The reaction splits cleanly down two lines in a way I found quite revealing.

The professional reviewers are broadly warm. They like the bronze-gold accent, several pointing out it actually makes the busy chronograph dial easier to read, a styling choice that's also a functional one. They like the subtle branding. They are pleasantly surprised that the price is only a couple of hundred pounds more than the standard non-Bond version of the same watch, which for a Bond edition is quite restrained, the "Bond tax" is usually brutal. A few have made the smart point that the gaming world is now far bigger than the film industry, and that a young person who plays as Bond for forty hours with this watch on their virtual wrist forms a far deeper connection than someone who sees a watch flash past for three seconds on a cinema screen.

The collectors and the forum crowd on the other hand, are not happy. The number one complaint is the size - that 17.2mm of thickness. People have called it a "hockey puck", said you'd need a nine inch wrist to pull it off (bit of an exaggeration), and one poor soul admitted he ordered it, misread the dimensions, it arrived and he sent it straight back because it was, in his words, "HUGE". The second complaint was the video game thing itself, with some feeling it cheapens the brand, that a Bond watch should be "an event" and this felt, in one particularly brutal phrase, "a bit lazy". A few reviewers say the whole exercise smacks of Omega leaning a bit too hard on the Bond name during a barren stretch with no actual film to sell.

So where am I at? Honestly, I think it's a brilliant watch that's been handed a slightly tricky job. The watchmaking isn't in question, that movement is superb, the finishing is lovely, the price is fair and anyone who buys one to actually wear and enjoy will be very happy, provided they've got the wrist for it. Because the size criticism isn't snobbery, it's just true. 44 × 17.2mm is a large, tall watch and on a slim wrist it'll wear like you've taped a macaroon to your arm. If you've got the wrist (like I have, big hands, big wrists and I rock a 46mm Apple Watch Ultra 3 as my daily) it'll look powerful and a bit special-forces. If you haven't, no amount of heritage is going to save you.

The Tailor's Angle, The Bit Only I Can Give You

Here's where I can offer you something none of the watch reviewers can, because they're watch people and I'm a clothes person (who owns an Omega but wears an Apple Watch most weekdays because I’m 5 kgs overweight and need to be held accountable), and a huge number of my clients, like the gentleman who started all this, are serious watch enthusiasts.

A watch doesn't exist on its own (well apart from mine which lives in its winder) - a watch lives on a wrist, that wrist comes out of a cuff, and that cuff belongs to a shirt and a jacket, which is my entire world. And this is where the 007 First Light Omega gets kind of interesting from where I'm sitting, because there's a practical consideration that I don't think the watch press has fully clocked.

James Bond, the actual character we all carry in our heads, is the most elegantly dressed man in cinema history. Beautifully cut dinner jackets, the perfect press on a shirt cuff, everything lean, precise and understated. The whole point of a watch on a man dressed like that is that it slips under the cuff and whispers rather than shouts. It peeks out, but it doesn't punch you in the face. This watch is 17.2mm thick. It’s not slipping under anybody's non-tailored shirt cuff. Hand on heart, twenty three years in this trade, you will not get a standard double cuff shirt and jacket to close cleanly over this thing without a proper fight, and if you forced it you'd ruin the line of the sleeve, you'd get an ugly bulge, the cuff would ride up (not to mention be unbearably tight) and the whole proportion of the arm goes to pot. Unless you get your shirts and jackets made it’s going to be a tricky one to deal with. For my Apple Watch Ultra I have my left shirt cuff made to specifically accommodate it and my jacket sleeves are always made a little wider at the wrist to allow for this in turn.

So the Omega "007 First Light" Seamaster is - in my mind - fundamentally a sports watch, a weekend watch; a polo-shirt-and-chinos watch, and that's completely fine, but it means that for all the Bond glamour, this is not a watch you might wear with a suit. It's a watch you wear once you've taken the suit off.

And actually, I think that's perfect for the watch's own story. This isn't dinner-jacket Bond. This is twenty-six-year-old, not-yet-polished, still-reckless Bond - the version before he learned to dress properly, before some long-suffering Q-branch tailor sat him down and taught him about cut and proportion and the magic of a properly weighted shoulder. A big, brash, slightly-too-much sports watch on the wrist of a young man who hasn't yet grown into his elegance? That's bang on. That's exactly what that “kid” would wear. The watch tells the same story as the game.

And there's a wider point in here that I keep coming back to with my own clients, because it's the same thing I bang on about with clothes all the time, the difference between something being scarce and something being special. We've established this watch isn't likely to make you money, it's not limited, they may make 1000s and 1000s of them, so as an investment, forget it. But "will it go up in value" is, I'd gently suggest, maybe the wrong question, and it's exactly the wrong question people ask me about a bespoke suit. Nobody buys one of my suits expecting to flip it in five years for a profit, and if they did I'd quietly suggest they'd misunderstood the entire exercise. You buy it because of how it makes you feel when you put it on, because it tells your story, because it's yours and it fits your life and your body and nobody else's. The value is in the wearing, not the reselling.

That’s perhaps the way to look at this watch. If you're buying it because you fancy a quick profit, you've misunderstood it. Walk away and find a proper limited edition. But if you're buying it because you grew up getting destroyed at GoldenEye, because a young scrappy Bond speaks to something in you, because you've got the wrist and you love the way that bronze-gold ring catches the light, then it's worth every penny. The only guaranteed return on anything you wear is how it makes you feel, and that's as true of an eight grand Omega as it is of one of my suits.

Future Classic, Or Future Footnote?

So, is it a future classic? My honest answer to that question is that it depends on something that has nothing to do with the watch. It depends on the game.

This watch is tied to 007 First Light in a way no previous Bond Omega has ever been tied to a single film. If that game turns out to be a smash hit, a cultural phenomenon, the GoldenEye of its generation, then this watch becomes the artefact of that moment, and in fifteen or twenty years people will hunt for it and tell stories about it and that "first ever Bond chronograph" line on the back will really mean something. That's a real upside. But if the game does just ok and then fades the way most games do, this becomes a beautifully made, historically interesting footnote, the first Omega Bond chronograph, the one that came from a game - a lovely curiosity rather than a holy grail.

My instinct, and it’s only an instinct, is that it ends up landing somewhere in the middle. It's too well made, too well designed and too genuinely novel to be forgotten about, that "first chronograph" tag is a proper hook for the completist collectors who need one of everything. But it's too widely produced and too divisive on size to ever become the white-hot, ten-grand-over-retail object the SPECTRE became.

It'll be remembered. It just won't make you rich. And those two things were never the same thing anyway.

So, Should You Buy One?

If you've got the wrist and the right reasons, buy one in a heartbeat. I’m quite tempted myself - because from a design standpoint it’s the first new Omega in a while that has immediately turned my head.

If you're buying it to flip and make a profit, I'd gently steer you somewhere else, and probably try to sell you a suit and some smart casual outfits while I'm at it. Because at the end of the day this is a love letter, not an investment, and the men who get the most out of their clothes and their watches are always the ones who understood that distinction in the first place.

If you need help building a wardrobe that does justice to a watch you actually love, whether it's a chunky sports Omega for the weekend or something altogether sharper for your dinner suit, don't be a stranger. Reach out, or book an appointment, and let's get you properly sorted.

Roberto Revilla is an award-winning London bespoke tailor. He co-hosts the Tailoring Talk Magazine YouTube channel and podcast.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Omega 007 First Light a limited edition?
No, and this matters more than anything else if you're thinking about value. It's an open, unlimited special edition, so they'll make as many as people want to buy. That's why it isn't set up to appreciate the way the numbered limited editions like the 2015 SPECTRE did.

How much is the Omega 007 First Light?
It's £7,900 in the UK, around $9,400 in the States, which is actually only a couple of hundred more than the standard non-Bond version of the same watch, so for a Bond edition it's surprisingly restrained.

Why is it called "First Light"?
Because it was designed for the 007 First Light video game, not a film. It's a young, twenty-six-year-old Bond earning his licence to kill, the dawn of the legend, hence "First Light."

Is the Omega 007 First Light worth it?
If you've got the wrist for a large, tall watch and you're buying it to wear and enjoy, absolutely. If you're buying it as an investment to flip, I'd politely steer you elsewhere, because this is a love letter, not an asset.