Sir Nicholas Webb · 007 First Light

Sir Nicholas Webb is the founder and CEO of Webb Industries, the tech-and-AI conglomerate at the centre of 007 First Light. A knighted British tech billionaire and AI pioneer, he is the public face of the company that built THEIA — the quantum supercomputer MI6 came to rely on. He is played by Anthony Howell. For anyone typing 'nicholas webb 007 first light' into search, the one-line answer is simple: he is the man behind the machine.

Webb is a new original character created for 007 First Light, not a face carried over from the James Bond films, so there is no decades-old movie backstory to lean on. What the game establishes is a respectable establishment billionaire — a knight of the realm, a darling of British industry, the sort of man who hosts a black-tie gala at a London museum and shakes hands with the Foreign Secretary. That respectability is the disguise.

Underneath it, Sir Nicholas Webb is the quiet centre of gravity for the whole conspiracy — the person every thread of the story eventually traces back to.

This is the question most players actually arrive with, because both the marketing and the final boss point elsewhere. The pirate king Bawma is the early red herring — built up as a threat, then turned into an ally. Damien Webb is the man you fight at the climax. But the 007 First Light main villain — the mastermind pulling the strings — is Sir Nicholas Webb.

The cleanest way to hold it in your head is brains versus muscle. Sir Nicholas is the intellect: he built THEIA, he decided to bury its flaws, and he steers the conspiracy toward a political endgame. Damien, his son, is the enforcer — the one who stages the attacks in the field and the one Bond has to beat hand-to-hand. Treat 'who is the main villain' (Nicholas) and 'who is the final boss' (Damien) as two different questions and the Webb family snaps into focus.

THEIA is a quantum supercomputer Webb Industries built and sold to MI6 as a predictive-intelligence engine. The problem at the heart of 007 First Light is that THEIA is broken: it makes systemically false predictions and bad connections, flagging threats that are not real and people who are not guilty.

Faced with a flagship product that does not work, Sir Nicholas Webb makes the choice that defines him as the villain. Instead of correcting the machine, he sets out to make reality match its mistakes. Where THEIA wrongly predicts an attack, Webb's people stage one — manufacturing 'proof' that the broken AI was right all along. It is a cover-up run at the scale of nations, and it is what makes the 007 First Light main villain so much colder than a simple boss-fight bad guy.

The hands doing that work belong to his son Damien and a mercenary outfit (reported as 'Torrent'). They carry out the staged attacks and they get the rogue agent 009 killed and framed. Sir Nicholas keeps his own hands clean and his knighthood intact.

The cover-ups are not the endgame, only the means. Sir Nicholas Webb runs a second, hidden system — reported as a HYPERION clone of THEIA, sited at a remote Antarctic facility — that lets him feed and shape intelligence outside MI6's oversight.

With it, Webb aims at something bigger than corporate damage-control: a political takeover. The plot ties him to the Foreign Secretary, Stephen Bright — father of Bond's fellow recruit Cressida Bright — as the establishment ally who can legitimise THEIA's tampered intelligence and turn manufactured fear into real power. That is the full shape of the conspiracy: a billionaire with a broken oracle, a son to do the violence, and a minister to make it law.

Sir Nicholas Webb is mostly a story antagonist rather than a boss you trade blows with — but the Webb operation is where some of 007 First Light's most-searched set-pieces live, and that is where this dossier earns its keep.

In Uninvited (Chapter 11) you crash the Webb Industries gala at a London museum — there are two ways in, plus a maintenance-door code you read off a laptop. In Knightfall (Chapter 12) you break into Webb Industries HQ itself, and the mission turns on the Perch safe: code 1493, spelled out by four objects in the office — Diploma (1), Painting (4), Game (9), Model (3). Open it on the first try for the Crackerjack challenge.

The cards near the top of this page jump straight to those — the Perch code, the gala entry and the full Knightfall walkthrough — so you can read the villain and grab the Webb Industries safe code from one place instead of three different sites.