Remembering Perfect Dark, GoldenEye’s spiritual successor

With the Daniel Craig era ending in a somewhat divisive fashion among fans, an idea was bandied about in the run-up to No Time To Die: what if Bond was a woman? Of course, it upset a lot of traditionalists, while others thought it could take the series in a fresh direction. However, many seem to forget that Rare had already answered this hypothetical question in 2000 with the release of Perfect Dark.

Set in the near future of… 2023, this espionage thriller was the spiritual successor of GoldenEye 64 which introduced us to Joanna Dark in a gripping tale of corporate intrigue, cloned presidents, and alien conspiracies. While it never reached the commercial success of its predecessor, there’s a good argument to be made that Perfect Dark not only built on the successful foundations of GoldenEye but was a game that took its greatest strengths and managed to make them even better.

While GoldenEye garnered a 96 Metascore, Perfect Dark went one better with critics, earning a 97. Lauded as a stunning achievement in gameplay, AI and graphics, Perfect Dark should have been the top title on the N64 and yet, while it did sell plenty, it never quite could step out from Bond’s shadow.

So let’s take a look at what made the game great (and why it’s still well worth your time today) and how events beyond Rare’s control were perhaps the reason it never achieved little more than cult status.

Making GoldenEye better

The team at Rare took every aspect of GoldenEye and thought ‘How can we make this better?’ and succeeded. First of all, weapons are the bread-and-butter of first-person shooters. Fail to get those right and you’re already off to a bad start.

A lot of work went into animating them to feel different, right down to reload animations (which was a huge step up from GoldenEye’s method of having them disappear from view). But the best upgrade these weapons got was their alternate fire features.

While Perfect Dark wasn’t the first game to use alternate firing options in games, it was one of the most prominent and well-executed examples of the feature outside of Unreal Tournament.

Take the incredible concept of the Laptop Gun for example. The perfect espionage weapon. A fully working laptop you can sneak in undetected, which unfolds into a machine gun. The best part? Its alt-fire turns it into an autonomous turret that you could throw down for some covering fire. I bet you’d get good odds on it being heavily influenced by Robocop 2 as well.

Joanna had an array of gadgets to use in missions too, used as the player saw fit. NV goggles, the CamSpy, and the IR scanner were great tools for giving you the advantage in stealth-focused missions, while you could also hack terminals to disable defences and even use disguises at certain points in the game. It all made for an experience that was much more than running and gunning, and allowed players a much greater freedom in their approach to missions than GoldenEye ever did.

The AI got an overhaul, too. One of the few faults GoldenEye had was its AI, as enemies would happily stand in the line of fire with no sense of self-preservation. That’s why there were so many oddly-placed boxes to provide them with some cover. But in Perfect Dark, they would find their own. They would converge on sounds and co-ordinate their attacks, making for a much more tactically taxing and immersive experience.

Narratively speaking, Rare stepped it up too. No longer bound by the events of a film, they were free to craft their own story — with voice acting too, no less. So instead of a series of loosely connected levels taken from moments in the film, Perfect Dark is more of a cohesive narrative where its action is weaved into the plot. It’s far from the levels of storytelling we have in games today, but for the time, it was considered one of the game’s strengths.

Turning to history for inspiration

So, with all these improvements on GoldenEye, where did Perfect Dark come from? And why wasn’t it Tomorrow Never Dies? At a glance, you might think it was because of Electronic Arts swooping in and purchasing the Bond licence (to distribute, not kill) but the folks at Rare had already made their minds up before that. They didn’t want to be bound by the constraints of somebody else’s story. They wanted the freedom to make something bigger, better and get really creative. Ultimately, they wanted something that was their own. Something different.

And what could be more different than James Bond? Well, Joanna Dark of course.

“The idea was to do something that was the antithesis of Lara Croft,” said animator Brett Jones in an interview with Eurogamer. “Although she was incredibly successful, she was a bit two-dimensional. We wanted a heroine with a bit more pizzazz and snap to her… Joanna Dark, which is from Joan of Arc, Jeanne d’Arc being the French, so that’s where the name comes from.”

Are you kicking yourself as well at how glaringly obvious it is now it’s been pointed out? She was young, warlike, with a military background. Couple that with the team being fans of La Femme Nikita and Blade Runner, and you have a great mix for what ultimately became the overriding theme of Perfect Dark.

Development hell

But for all the game’s strengths, the underlying issues with its development were what prevented it from dethroning its spiritual predecessor. Partway through the game’s development, director Martin Hollis left Rare. Almost half of the team followed not long after. They formed Free Radical Design, who you may know made the wonderful TimeSplitters series.

While that didn’t help, all these new and amazing features added into Perfect Dark ultimately came at a cost as well. The game ran terribly on the N64, which meant the reluctant need for the Expansion Pak, a device that added additional memory to the console. This was an expense that many did not want to fork out for to play the game.

Between that, the lack of pull from the 007 licence, the launch of the PlayStation 2 in the same year, and the many delays caused by disruptions to the team, the reason for the game’s failure to step out of 007’s shadow in gaming culture lies somewhere between all of it.

Some years later, Rare tried again to bring Perfect Dark to a new audience as a launch title on the Xbox 360 in 2005. Perfect Dark Zero was a prequel, a safe bet not requiring prior knowledge of the original, and while the game was good, it was up against Call of Duty 2, which had essentially just redefined the FPS.

A perfect future?

As for the future of Perfect Dark? Well, like many other IPs that have faded with time, it’s getting the reboot treatment. Microsoft is looking to revive the franchise as one of its flagship titles, having prized it away from Rare and given it to Crystal Dynamics and The Initiative to develop instead.

Earth has been struck by a series of disasters, bringing ecosystems around the world to the verge of collapse. This time around the script has been flipped, as Daniel Carrington appears to be the villain of the piece as Joanna hunts him down to stop his terrorist scheme, only to uncover the mysteries that threaten the lives of millions.

Crystal Dynamics have experience with breathing new life into woman-led games, and if the latest trailer is anything to go by, fans of Joanna Dark have plenty of reason to be optimistic about her future.

If you can’t wait for that however, and you have Game Pass, you can play a HD remaster of Perfect Dark 64 in 4K and at 60 FPS, or dip into the prequel, Perfect Dark Zero.

It may not have lived up to the heights of its predecessor, and it may have been plagued with issues during its development. But in the end, it came out as a great game and one well worth checking out if you’re into gaming history. And if Perfect Dark showed us anything, it’s that the only person man enough to handle a job like this… is a woman — and that they don’t make game trailers like they used to.