Simple. James Bond:007 RPG by Victory Games. It dropped in 1983 — some about the time of Octopussy. (A terrible entry, especially considering the excellent George MacDonald Fraser wrote it, but after the much superior For Your Eyes Only — bleh!) It was published for about four years and was an a real break from the d20 TSR offering, Top Secret, which hove too tightly to the “class” idea (assassin, spy, whatever), and which still used a random damage system.
JB:007 allowed you to build your character for points, so you could get close to what you envisioned. It had a rudimentary weakness system that could have been buffed up a bit, but it was a start. The system was mostly straightforward — attribute and skill gave a base number, then that was modified by the difficulty. (This required some rudimentary math, so that was not popular, but they had a chart on your character sheet to help. Combat was not radically different from other tasks and the quality of your success dictated the damage you did, not a die roll, which a lot of new system still use and is still, I submit, stupid. Even Cortex used your success as the base damage, plus a weapon damage rating.
The guns, the knives, the cars and boats, the gadgets — all had specific ratings from the speed it could fire to damage, to range and accuracy, as well as how likely to malfunction. This was way cool in the ’80s, and later for someone who tried a lot of cars and shot a lot of different guns. The product placement idea wasn’t overt, but it was there.
They had a series of modules based on the movies and which they altered the plots or the action pieces to be a surprise. There was a combat simulator game that I ignored, and a few setting and equipment guides (which inspired the Q2 Manual here on Black Campbell).
I ran spy games, police procedurals, even a cyberpunk campaign and a Stargate game using this rules set from 1983 until about 2010, when for some inexplicable reason — I just didn’t want to deal with the spy genre anymore. The reasons were really inexplicable, but there were a host of them that converged at the same time to make it “not fun” anymore.
Lately, I’ve been eyeing the rules and thinking about how to run a spy game that decouples the characters from governments and their obvious run toward authoritarianism. simpler stuff like mercenary work ala Extraction or Kingsman.