Perfect Dark | Code Like It's 198x

When Perfect Dark’s cartridge reached N64 Magazine in a “plain white package from Twycross”, the staff had been previewing it for two years. They stayed up until four in the morning playing it, and still had not seen everything when they went to press. The only other games that had caused such a stir in their office, they wrote, were Mario, GoldenEye and Zelda. Rare’s follow-up to GoldenEye 007 ran on an upgraded version of the same engine, but swapped James Bond for a woman of its own invention, Joanna Dark, and a near future of corporations, conspiracies and aliens. It was made by a team that lost its director and several of its senior members before it was finished, and it asked so much of the Nintendo 64 that most of it would not run without extra memory.

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: Rare.
Released: 22 May 2000 in North America and 30 June 2000 in Britain, for the Nintendo 64.
Directors: Martin Hollis for the first 14 months; David Doak for part of the second half; Mark Edmonds led the team to completion.
Hardware: the single-player missions needed the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak.
Reception: 96% in N64 Magazine, 94% in GamesMaster.

Leaving Bond behind

Rare was asked for a GoldenEye sequel and turned it down. “Three years day-in day-out living with James Bond was enough for me,” Hollis told Retro Gamer in 2005. “I think we were all pretty sick of the Bond universe by the time we were finished.” He wanted a heroine seen through the player’s eyes, which in a first-person game “broke all the rules. It would be as if ‘you’ were a woman.” He named his influences: Level 9’s secret agent Kim Kimberly, Luc Besson’s Nikita, Joan of Arc, Dana Scully of The X-Files and Ghost in the Shell. He and Doak had been reading Philip K. Dick. The locations came first, and Doak then wrote a plot to join them; he named the villainous corporation dataDyne after the Yoyodyne of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

The title was meant to describe the play as well. Hollis hoped that light and darkness would be central to it, but the hardware would not cooperate: Steve Ellis built a torch, and it “didn’t work well because of interaction between texture projection and perspective correction”. What survived, N64 Magazine reported, was real-time lighting. Lights glowed, and a player could shoot them out and switch to night-vision goggles.

A team that came apart

Hollis directed Perfect Dark for its first 14 months of a three-year project, then left in 1998 to work for Nintendo of America; he later founded the Cambridge studio Zoonami. His departure, Retro Gamer wrote in 2004, “seemed to trigger the gradual dissolution of the team”. Doak, who took over the direction, left at the end of 1998, “soon followed by Steve Ellis”, who had turned GoldenEye into a multiplayer game. By 2001 Doak, Ellis, Karl Hilton and Graeme Norgate were running Free Radical Design, whose first game was TimeSplitters for the PlayStation 2. Doak’s verdict on the game he left behind was that it “had some good ideas but was dog slow”. Mark Edmonds, another GoldenEye veteran, led the team through the rest of development.

Some ideas did not survive. Players were to have been able to put their own faces on the multiplayer characters with the Game Boy Camera; by April 2000 N64 Magazine reported the feature dropped, having “fallen foul of America’s moral minority”, and in its review said it was “hardly surprising” that it had been removed.

The Expansion Pak

The Nintendo 64 had 4 MB of memory, and Perfect Dark’s missions would not fit in it. “Perfect Dark’s huge single player levels won’t run without the expansion pak,” N64 Magazine warned in April 2000. Edge’s review put it plainly: without the 4 MB add-on the game was “massively restricted”, and with it, “it suddenly metamorphoses”.

Joanna Dark’s world

The game is set in 2023. Joanna Dark, the Carrington Institute’s new agent, has just set record scores in training and is sent into the dataDyne skyscraper to rescue a scientist, Dr Carroll, who turns out to be an artificial intelligence in a hovering laptop. The trail leads to Area 51, where she rescues an alien called Elvis, to Air Force One and the ocean floor, and finally to the home world of the Skedar, reptilian aliens in league with dataDyne. Not everyone welcomed the change of enemy: N64 Magazine noted that the “switch from human enemies to Turok-style aliens for the last couple of levels” had not gone down well with all its staff.

As in GoldenEye, each mission has three difficulty settings, and a harder setting brings more objectives. Retro Gamer counted three objectives in a typical mission on the easiest setting, Agent, five on the middle one and seven on Perfect Agent. N64 Magazine warned that the story could be hard to follow on Agent, because events mentioned in the cut scenes only happen on the harder settings.

Every weapon had a second function. Edge singled out the laptop gun, which could be thrown down to act as a sentry gun, and the gadgets: floating spy cameras and X-ray goggles. The FarSight rifle could see and shoot through walls; the RC-P120’s secondary function was a cloaking device. The guards drew as much attention. They picked up dropped weapons, tried to disarm the player, surrendered, and sometimes played dead: N64 Magazine advised a second shot at a downed guard, because “if he was only playing dead, his head will nod in agreement when you finish him off”. A surprised guard might spray bullets, run off shouting for help, or find his gun jammed and surrender, saying “I was just doing my job”.

Simulants and Counter-Operative

The multiplayer mode was, in N64 Magazine’s words, “more than good enough to have been released as a stand-alone game”. Up to four players could fight each other and computer-controlled “simulants”, which could be friends or foes, with 17 different character traits and several difficulty levels; the magazine found them “much more deadly than any human players”. Nearly everything could be customised, from team names to weapon sets, and a string of challenges unlocked new arenas and characters. Hollis’s own favourite was the King of the Hill mode.

Two players could also play the missions together. In co-operative mode the second player was Joanna’s sister, Velvet. In Counter-Operative, one player was Joanna and the other played the enemy force, taking over the guards trying to stop her.

Reception

N64 Magazine gave it 96% and called it “the biggest game in the world”, concluding: “If you had to choose just one game for your N64, this would be it.” Edge said “you won’t find a better FPS”, while noting an occasional frame-rate problem. GamesMaster gave it 94%. The frame rate was the complaint that stuck: in 2010 the lead artist on its remaster called it “atrocious”. Edge reported that the game “shifted 2.5m copies”, well short of GoldenEye’s eight million; Rare’s Chris Tilston later gave a lifetime figure of 3.2 million.

The Game Boy Color game

Rare also made a Perfect Dark for the Game Boy Color, released in 2000. Set shortly before the Nintendo 64 game, it follows Joanna through her final training mission and her first assignments. Planet Game Boy reported a rumble motor built into the cartridge, infrared trading and support for the Game Boy Printer, and a Transfer Pak link that unlocked cheats in the Nintendo 64 version, among them All Guns. Edge later named Richard Brough, who went on to lead programming at Pocket Studios, as one of the programmers of the “inventive GBC translation”.

Perfect Dark Zero and after

Rare began a prequel for the GameCube. After Microsoft bought Rare in 2002 it moved to the Xbox, and then to the Xbox 360, where Perfect Dark Zero was a launch game in November 2005. Its project lead was Chris Tilston, and Duncan Botwood, a designer on the original, designed its multiplayer, which supported up to 32 players online. It is set three years before Perfect Dark.

In 2010 the original returned on Xbox Live Arcade, remastered by the Dundee studio 4J Studios. Microsoft’s producer, Nick Ferguson, called it “a remastering rather than a remake. It really is the original N64 game running under the hood”, now at 60 frames per second and with online play. That version was included in the 2015 compilation Rare Replay, and the Nintendo 64 original was added to Nintendo’s online classics service in 2024.

At The Game Awards in December 2020 Microsoft announced a new Perfect Dark from The Initiative, a studio it had set up in 2018, with Crystal Dynamics joining as co-developer in 2021. Gameplay was first shown at the Xbox Games Showcase in June 2024. In July 2025, amid Microsoft’s job cuts, the game was cancelled and The Initiative closed. No new Perfect Dark has been announced since.

Sources

N64 Magazine issue 40, April 2000, pp. 24–25: preview; the single-player levels need the Expansion Pak; the Game Boy Camera face-mapping dropped; the RC-P120’s cloaking device.
N64 Magazine issue 42, June 2000: review by Martin Kitts, 96%: the white package from Twycross, release dates, Joanna Dark and the Carrington Institute, the lighting, the guards’ behaviour, the multiplayer customisation, simulants and their 17 traits, co-operative and Counter-Operative modes, the Agent-mode story, the alien levels, the removed face mapping, “If you had to choose just one game for your N64, this would be it”. The score is repeated in issue 44, August 2000.
Edge issue 85, June 2000, p. 72: Testscreen review: the Expansion Pak, the difficulty settings and objectives, the laptop gun sentry, spy cameras and X-ray goggles, the AI, the frame rate, “you won’t find a better FPS”.
Retro Gamer issue 6, 2004, profile of David Doak: Hollis leaving in 1998, Doak at the end of 1998, Ellis soon after; “Perfect Dark had some good ideas but was dog slow”.
Retro Gamer issue 19, 2005, pp. 74–79, “The legacy of Perfect Dark” and a Q&A with Martin Hollis: the turned-down sequel, the influences, dataDyne and Yoyodyne, the torch light, Hollis’s 14 months and move to Nintendo of America, King of the Hill, the 2023 setting and plot, the objectives by difficulty, GamesMaster’s 94%, Perfect Dark Zero moving from GameCube to Xbox.
Edge issue 84, May 2000: Free Radical Design and TimeSplitters. Edge issue 102, October 2001, pp. 38–39: Doak, Ellis, Hilton and Norgate at Free Radical Design.
N64 Magazine issue 13, March 1998, p. 58, and Retro Gamer issue 38, 2007, p. 29: Mark Edmonds on the GoldenEye team.
Planet Game Boy issue 3, March 2000: the Game Boy Color game, its setting before the N64 game, rumble, infrared, printer and Transfer Pak cheats.
Edge issue 92, Christmas 2000, p. 50: Richard Brough and the Game Boy Color Perfect Dark.
Edge issue 155, November 2005, pp. 38–42: Perfect Dark Zero’s team (Botwood, Tilston) and its 32-player limit.
Edge issue 212, March 2010: the Xbox Live Arcade remaster by 4J Studios, Nick Ferguson and David Keningale, the frame rate, 2.5 million copies sold.
Wikipedia, “Perfect Dark” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): release dates, Mark Edmonds as team leader, Tilston’s 3.2 million figure (from a 2011 Eurogamer interview), Rare Replay, the 2024 re-release, Perfect Dark Zero’s November 2005 release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark
Wikipedia, “Perfect Dark (cancelled video game)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the 2020 announcement, The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics, the 2024 showcase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark_(cancelled_video_game)
Variety, “Microsoft Scraps ‘Perfect Dark’ Reboot, ‘Everwild’ and Other Games, Closes Studio The Initiative”, 2 July 2025 (web, secondary). https://variety.com/2025/gaming/news/perfect-dark-everwild-game-canceled-microsoft-initiative-1236446212/