One of the changes to the plot of the video game is the absence of the villainous organisation SPECTRE, who played a vital role in the film. Due to legal issues that have plagued the James Bond film series since 1963, the organization was renamed "OCTOPUS" and appears to lack a central leader in the same vein as Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The SPECTRE name was tied up in a long-running dispute over the film rights to "Thunderball", between United Artists/MGM and the now-deceased writer Kevin McClory.