Thanks for the memory
Inevitably the team’s ambition outstripped their means. From the beginning of the project, they agreed they would not make Perfect Dark so big it required the Expansion Pak, which added 4MB of memory to the N64. But as the game grew, it soon became clear there was no other choice.
“Everything gets a little bit better and before you know it you’re out of memory,” says Hollis. “We ended up pretty much obliged to use the memory pak. Nintendo was fine with that situation. I wasn’t comfortable with the impact it had on the final price of the game, but it still sold amazingly well.”
It helped that the Perfect Dark team were not the only ones having memory problems on the N64. Nintendo itself had opted to make the pak mandatory for players of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (released Christmas 2000, after Perfect Dark) and the fellow Rare developers behind Donkey Kong 64 had ended up bundling the pak in with the game – upping the price by around £10 – the previous Christmas.
We ended up pretty much obliged to use the memory pak. Nintendo was fine with that situation
The issue, Edmonds says, was the N64 developer kits had more memory than the home models, which made it all too easy to add in more features. The challenge of bringing the game’s size down to something that would fit in a single cartridge and run on a standard console became impossible, so he was relieved to see both the Donkey Kong and Zelda teams using the expansion. “It happened to be around the same sort of time we found we didn’t have enough memory either,” he recalls. “So we were lucky because if they weren’t doing that, we would have been stuck.”
Chesluk adds: “We did a load of work trying to get it down, spent a few months on it, but the best we could manage was the version you got without the Expansion Pak, where it’s a bit of multiplayer but it’s more of a taster. There was talk of bundling with the Expansion Pak at one point, but Donkey Kong 64 had already done that – although I’m not sure how much demographic crossover there was between people buying both Donkey Kong and Perfect Dark.”
Without the Expansion Pak, players could only access the Combat Simulator, the basic multiplayer with all its arenas, modes, challenges and the simulants. Even getting this to run properly was a challenge, although Edmonds recalls another stroke of luck in the arrival of Rob Harrison, a programmer who had been working on Donkey Kong Racing, which was later cancelled. Harrison was given the sole purpose of enabling the multiplayer to run within the N64’s normal memory limits so that players without the pak could at least play something.
Despite the efforts put into the single-player campaign, Edmonds recognises that making multiplayer available in the standard edition made the most sense. For one thing, it was the most popular feature of GoldenEye and offered more replay value to players. “It was also the easiest thing to get into that memory,” he admits.
Other tricks were used to reduce the game's memory footprint. Bury recalls finding ways to flip and tile textures to make them look like different things, rather than creating new ones from scratch, while Chesluk says the effects played over the credits were other textures from the game warped in various ways.
Not everything was cut due to memory constraints, however. Famously, Perfect Dark originally had a function that would allow players to use a Game Boy Camera to take pictures of their face that could then be mapped onto multiplayer characters. This was up and running, but Nintendo wasn’t too comfortable with the idea of allowing players to shoot each other’s real faces – especially during a time of ongoing debates about violence in video games.
There were more accidental casualties, too. Many Nintendo fans may remember that Rare eventually released push button combinations that unlocked all of GoldenEye’s cheats and weapons, and there was speculation as to whether this would be true of Perfect Dark as well.
Chesluk confirms that it was, but adds: “Now’s a good time to apologise. During the time when we had to crush it down from 8MB to 4MB, we were going through code looking for stuff to delete and I found this file from GoldenEye where someone had put in all the button cheats. And I thought, ‘Oh, there’s no button cheats, this must be old.’ So I deleted it. Sorry. I’m very sorry.”
They had to impress upon us the fact that this game did have to ship. The N64 was getting towards the end of its life, so every week that you don’t ship is sales lost
The unintended deletion of the button cheats was symptomatic of the pressure on the team during the final push. Chesluk even recalls the team being “pulled into the office for a bollocking” because development was taken so long – even with an extension. “They had to impress upon us the fact that this game did have to ship,” he says. “The N64 was getting towards the end of its life, so every week that you don’t ship is sales lost.”
Sure enough, the GameCube was announced just a couple of months after Perfect Dark, and a year later it was on shelves in Japan and North America. Chesluk even had a GameCube dev kit on his desk at the time; a permanent reminder of its upcoming arrival.
“We probably should have left more on the floor,” he admits. “But everyone wanted to make the game that we made. Maybe management should have pushed for an earlier release, but it wouldn’t have been as cool. Multiplayer, for example, had so many options and they all needed their own testing, had their own bugs. The logical management thing to do would be to cut those down to half, but we were like, ‘No, let’s go for it, let’s fix the bugs.’ There was a lot of commitment on the team to fixing the problems rather than giving up.”
Edmonds remembers the final stretch, where every day started with another list of bugs that needed to be resolved. It was like fighting the tide, and Nintendo’s eagerness to start manufacturing the game led to the accidental creation of a separate – and flawed – version of Perfect Dark.
“Right at the very end, there was a really nasty bug,” Edmonds explains. “If you played one of the challenges with three people, it always crashed. There was a random memory overwrite in there. This was on the last day or two of development, so potentially every day’s version could be the one Nintendo would decide to release. There were only three bugs left, and one was this crashing bug. It took us a day to track it down, so we made a fixed version the next day.
“But then we were told Nintendo had used the previous version to start making the cartridges. So I think the first million cartridges had that bug in. Then they used the next version to make the rest. So there are two versions out there. It was just unfortunate – if they’d waited one more day, that bug wouldn’t have been in there.”
Dark Legacy
On May 22nd, 2000, Perfect Dark was released in North America. It would arrive in the UK and Europe just over a month later, and all three releases got entirely different covers (you can find out why here).
The game sold well, shifting well over two million copies, but sadly this didn’t compare to the eight million GoldenEye went on to sell. For Edmonds, there were two crucial factors: the lack of a familiar icon like James Bond, and the requirement for the Expansion Pak. Yet this doesn’t take away from Perfect Dark’s accomplishments. While technologically it may be a little clunky – some members of the team still regret the slow framerate – in many ways Joanna Dark’s debut was ahead of its time.
To this day, publishers and developers still struggle to engage people with asymmetrical multiplayer – a concept Perfect Dark explored with Counter-Op twenty years ago. Few shooters enable the full campaign to be played in co-op, and the extensive multiplayer options available in Combat Simulator still stands as a far more comprehensive offering that GoldenEye’s.
It’s the little touches as well. The ability to shoot weapons out of the enemies’ hands, or shoot out the lights and plunge the level into darkness – there were even plans for a torch, but the N64 wasn’t powerful enough to pull off the effect.
Then there’s the fact that starting the Carrington Villa mission on a higher difficulty placed you in a different starting point (that of the negotiator from the opening cutscene) faced with two guards and no weapons. Or every weapon having a secondary function, some of which included player-controlled homing rockets, wall-mounted sentry guns, and the X-ray vision enabling you to shoot through walls. Or missions that remembered your actions in the previous level, such as moving a hoverbike in Air Force One to make it available in Crash Site.
All these ideas and more were almost unheard of at the time, yet somehow crammed into a cartridge that offered a fraction of the storage available on PlayStation CDs of the same period. Doak attributes this not to a determined desire to push the boundaries of the N64, but to the natural ambition of the team.
“We certainly didn’t have a big design document of all the revolutionary things we were going to attempt to do,” he says. “Because of the size of the team, and because we got on well... It was a different era in terms of implementing things. In some ways, it was harder because you had to build all the technology, but in other ways, it was easier because you could do stuff without having to talk to dozens of people and also ask permission for stuff. That’s where all the bland comes from.”
Novakovic says that, like GoldenEye, Perfect Dark was a “major milestone” for Rare, adding: “The fact that we’re still talking about it twenty years on shows how groundbreaking it was at the time. I can’t take any credit for that but I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to play a part in such an important game.”
It was bumping up against what the console could do, but then I don’t think that’s unusual. We had a lot of ideas, and lots of clever people working out how to do them
Botwood says: “It was bumping up against what the console could do, but then I don’t think that’s unusual. We had a lot of ideas, and lots of clever people working out how to do them. We had what I think was an amazing game. It suffered from the memory limitations – we didn’t pay enough attention to those during development and we had to use the expansion pak, which was sad. If we could only have done a bit more on that, maybe more people would have experienced the single-player and all that good stuff. That may have been why the audience wasn’t big enough for some of those things.
“We were fortunate to have done that project at Rare and to have had the backup and resources that studio gave it. It wasn’t as big a hit as GoldenEye, but it was certainly just as much fun to make by the end of it. It was good to be able to flex some muscle and get some ideas down that would not have fit in GoldenEye or that we couldn’t make at the time. It was much more fun to work on Perfect Dark in design terms, because we had more freedom to do what we wanted.”
Doak pays particular respect to Botwood, Edmonds and Jones. “We dropped them in it by leaving, and they delivered. I got to work on the easy part of the game where everyone was making up things, but then you actually have to make them, which is really hard. The game knocked it out of the park.”
Future Perfect
While it may not have sold as well as GoldenEye, it certainly performed well enough to warrant a sequel. Shortly after the game was completed, the team began work on a new Perfect Dark for GameCube – a project that would eventually become the Xbox 360 prequel Perfect Dark Zero. That game’s development is a troubled story for another time, but it’s intriguing to think what it could have become had Rare not been purchased by Microsoft just two years after Perfect Dark launched.
“There were missteps on Perfect Dark Zero,” Bury admits. “It didn’t help that it jumped from console to console. We had a GameCube version of that and it was brilliant, it played really well. I preferred the style and the look of it, and the controls were great. Then it jumped to the Xbox and then Xbox 360, and each time it seemed to just lose something.”
Botwood notes that the teams on GoldenEye and Perfect Dark were smaller, making it easier for the developers to bounce ideas off each other. By the time Zero was in the works for the Xbox 360, development had changed: teams were larger, and so was the scope for games like Rare’s shooter.
“For GameCube, it had a particular style which I quite liked and thought would be more in keeping with that trajectory,” Botwood recalls. “But because Rare was sold and it went through so many technology iterations, that tends to slow down video game development. At times like that, people tend to iterate on the core of the project, which is natural but it can be disruptive. I think that’s what happened with Zero. It’s not that the project itself couldn’t stand alone at the end of it, but it suffered from an overly long development cycle, as we’ve seen with other games. But it dragged on for reasons out of the team’s control.”
That team had a real magic about them. GoldenEye was revolutionary, but I think Perfect Dark is equally revolutionary. It had a real specialness about it
For Kirkhope, none of Zero’s failings take away from the legacy of the first Perfect Dark. “That team had a real magic about them. GoldenEye was revolutionary, but I think Perfect Dark is equally revolutionary. It had a real specialness about it. Perfect Dark Zero didn’t quite do as well, so it still feels like the original is the Perfect Dark. I think it needs a reboot, or another one.”
On that topic, rumours persist that a Perfect Dark reboot is indeed in the works – and not at Rare. 10 years after the N64 original was remastered for Xbox Live Arcade (you can get that very same version on Rare Replay), it’s been suggested that new Xbox studio The Initiative is developing a brand new Perfect Dark for Xbox Series X – something that particularly intrigues Kirkhope. “If there were making a reboot, I’d love to have another crack at it,” he says.
Other members of the team are less enthusiastic, although just as interested to see how a new Perfect Dark might turn out. Botwood points to the success Xbox had by passing another Rare IP, Killer Instinct, over to a different studio, so a non-Rare Perfect Dark team could still do justice to the 2000 original.
“I wish them every success, genuinely, because I do like that world,” he says. “I had a part in creating it, but I probably would not want to work on it because that would mean going backwards. I’m at Ubisoft now and playing in their worlds, which is great. I would look forward to seeing it, although I do not envy their job of updating it.”
Bury notes that any new Perfect Dark will likely have a much larger team that the N64 title and therefore, like Zero, might lack that special spark. “If they’re expanding on the original, they’ve got a better chance of matching it rather than coming up with their own ideas and having a massive studio to do it,” he says. “The way I work now, it’s the same thing – you’re not involved in everything, you just can’t be because there are too many people.”
Hollis, meanwhile, likens it to game adaptations of films. So much has happened in the last twenty years that the two projects will be incomparable. But the good adaptations – like GoldenEye, perhaps – “very faithfully capture a small kernel of the original’s core.”
“It’s hard to say what that essence is, but they manage to capture and they manage to transfer it,” he says. “They might change everything around it beyond recognition, but as long as they have that central core and they’re faithful to that core, they can get away with it. Most films of books, games of films, and most game sequels suffer this same problem – they don’t manage to capture the essence of the original. It isn’t even written down in a document. If it is anywhere in this world, it’s in the minds of a few people who worked on that original project.”
With those few people who worked on Perfect Dark scattered across the games industry and beyond, it’s unlikely that magic will ever truly be recaptured. But with the N64 shooter still standing proud after twenty years, perhaps it’s time for Joanna Dark to have one more chance at being perfect.
Comments 88
I smell a remaster...
I was disappointed there was no mention of the Perfect Dark book series written by Greg Rucka. They were excellent and much better than the average tie in stuff.
Great game but I can’t handle the 15fps gameplay now it’s just horrible.
Perfect Dark > Goldeneye.
I've sunk countless hours into this game. Truly a masterpiece and ahead of its time.
Perfect Dark is forever.
Rare Replay on Switch..please?
20 years ago.... I got this upon day of release and remember eagerly coming home from school to play it.... Great game!!
I'll never think this is better than Goldeneye. Please find a way to make friends with Microsoft and rerelease it please.
I dont have time to read 4 pages of this on my phone. Is this coming to switch?
Goldeneye was a lot better. This game had good ideas, at least but had some big flaws, even somefans don't want admit.
I sincerely hope we get the remastered version along other RAREWARE classics for the Switch eventually...
Amazing game but a goldeneye beater? No way on earth. Great game tho, really great.
@TCF what you did there, I see it.
-offers highest of Fives-
@FlashBoomerang yet you failed to mention any.
If anything- both games are spectacular if we are being honest with ourselves.
@NoNoseNosferatu The game(in n64) have a bug in the beggining which sometimes disable the control, and don't let you even start the game. In nintendo 64. This one is enough?
And once it start happen, the game will replicate the error, each time the cartidge is inserted. Just to you have a idea why some people hate this game. Is not a hardware error. Both the console yet could run other games, the cartrige yet could run in other n64s. Was a error in the code. I have no idea if someone found the cause.
The bug happen after the logos, in a selection screen. Try use other controllers or put controllers in the other slots of controllers don't work too.
A hugely enjoyable and insightful article Perfect Dark's legacy is of one of the most feature-rich and technically impressive games ever made. It may not have sold in numbers which their other series did but, it remains Rare's finest hour, without doubt.
@FlashBoomerang I had both games for the N64 and I never had those problems. Maybe you just had terrible luck with a bad copy of the game.
@FlashBoomerang English isn’t your first language, I see. What is your native language?
@FlashBoomerang I've never once heard of that 'bug' in my entire life. So, not really.
@Tetsuo_808 you may never heard once, but readed once right now.
Great article! I remember buying this from Game in Durham and getting a free 3rd party controller and guide book. Happy days.
Also a fascinating glimpse into Rare. I recall being surprised people wanted to leave the company back then but, reading this, it becomes clearer. Still, it's an amazing game and all who worked on it deserve huge credit.
I loved this game and I would really love another first person spy shooter. Loved all the guns and reload animations, fantastic stuff . . . . Loved most of the missions apart from some later ones with the aliens as enemies and the alien guns were a bit rubbish for me. But wow 20 years x x x
Rare Replay on Switch would be crazy levels of good! Probably one of the biggest events in modern gaming on so many levels. Buuut, big Phil did say there were no plans for more Microsoft games. Maybe we will be in for a surprise. Hope so.
I was a huge fan of both games back in the day. I thought Perfect Dark was the better of the two gameplay wise but storyline became a little too bonkers. Goldeneye had the superior style.
Perfect Dark, one of my Top 10 games on the N64, and I know from two of my friends that it is their number 1 game on the system.
This was the game of the future in 2000, and we were playing multiplayer every night for months.
4 players and only 15 fps? We didn't care, at the time there was nothing better or more fun than Perfect Dark.
It's a shame they were sold to Microsoft, I'd have loved to see Joanna (and Conker and Fulgore) in Smash, but only the Perfect Dark remote mines made it into Melee.
Oh, and happy 20th anniversary! Majora's Mask and Paper Mario, too!
HD version is also 10 years old. My god.
Perfect time to release PD:HD on switch I think
I never had this game back in the day, so I don't have any nostalgia to it like I do Goldeneye.
Just to agree with most... not better than Goldeneye but still a great game
My household was very aware of Perfect Dark but we were so addicted to the multiplayer mayhem of GoldenEye we didn't have the will to stop playing it. My brothers and I were just too hooked on it our attitude was very "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and probably afraid to make the leap to the next version despite it's high reviews. We always had so many friends over for endless hours of GoldenEye it made us too stubborn to move on from it. LOL ride or die attitude.
@Deanster101 IKR! I never beat this game and decided to play it a couple weeks ago and, man...that framerate is ROUGH! It’s absolutely unplayable because of it.
I know some people will disagree with me but for what it’s worth I reckon Perfect Dark is STILL the most forward thinking FPS ever built for a console. The multiplayer mode is chock full of so many smart ideas I’m amazed more games haven’t pilfered it’s corpse for ideas.
You could do everything from work as a team of 4 against an AI team of 8 fully customised boys to recreating the lobby scene from the Matrix.
The counter-operative mode where one player plays as every bad guy in a level should be mandatory in every FPS!
I couldn't even begin to tell you how much i loved/love this game. I played countless HOURS of Combat Simulator. I loved being able to customize the map, with weapons, and Sims. I'd LOVE to see a remaster of it, but probably will never happen.
@Kidfunkadelic83 GoldenEye is a bit boring compared to Perfect Dark. It’s like supermarket vanilla compared to a parlour of flavours.
@jakebrake It’s only £6 on Xbox Live for 360 or Xbox One.
@RadioHedgeFund I know : ( i don't have an Xbox tho.... > . < I wish it was on Steam!
No offense to Perfect Dark but I still prefer GoldenEye 64. But, yeah, this is also a classic.
@RadioHedgeFund imo then your shopping at the wrong supermarket 😉. Nah ive played both and love both but for me GE just takes the win. Dont get me wrong, i do love PD also.
Incredible article. So many funny little stories in here.
A genuine classic. There were a bunch of games released late into the N64's life that suffered in sales because of the new consoles were coming. But they were incredible — This, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Banjo Tooie (ish, isn't as good as the first), Paper Mario, WWF No Mercy, Majora's Mask.
Great feature! Perfect Dark was an amazing game in every sense
Wasn't this game exchanged for the rights to Donkey Kong. I remember Nintendo gave up everything for free but keep Donkey Kong.
@RadioHedgeFund I agree 100%. The Multiplayer was simply amazing, many summers, weekends and holidays were spent clocked into the multiplayer.
@mesome713 I have no idea what you are talking about. The IP was always owned by Rare.
Excellent article! Perfect Dark was the first game I ever bought with my own money. I remember printing out a preview I had read online and taking it to school with me to read it to all my friends. My anticipation for this game was driving me crazy! Fortunately, the game absolutely lived up to my expectations. I wouldn't be surprised if I've spent well over a thousand hours playing this game over the years.
On a less positive note, Perfect Dark Zero remains the most disappointing game I've ever played to this day. Of course, that's partially because I love the original so much. I would love to see the remaster (along with the rest of Rare Replay) come to Switch as that's one of the few Xbox exclusives I've ever been interested in.
A remarkable game, really.
Single-player was good, though, in hindsight, and when compared to what PC gamers were already enjoying at the time, it feels a bit too middle-of-the-road, neither as beautifully straightforward as Doom (or Doom 64), nor as cinematic as Half-Life, nor as involved and systems-rich as Deus Ex or System Shock 2.
But then again, the single-player campaign was just one little part of Perfect Dark. It also had the hub, at the Carrington Institute, with little minigames, a shooting gallery, and places to discover. It had its co-op and counter operative modes, which this article mentions. And it had the incredible Combat Simulator, which was technically the multiplayer mode but was, actually, and thanks to the bots, the challenges, and the allure of moving up the game's internal rankings, a kind of covert single-player mode, since you had so many options at your disposal that you could create really interesting and creative scenarios and have plenty of fun by yourself, which I certainly did whenever I didn't have friends over.
@Arkay Nintendo owned 50% of Rare.
@jump I had no idea the books existed, and now I'm going to go find them. Thanks for the tip.
@mesome713 That sounds very odd.
Rare developed the DK games for Nintendo, it was always Nintendo's IP and all of Rare's work on DK would be owned by Nintendo.
I don't believe Rare would have had any legal rights to the work they did with Nintendo's IP.
Rareware's original IPs are a different story, those properties were never owned by Nintendo.
Great game.
A reminder of how great Rare was, and could have still been, before all the talent left the company.
It's unfortunate that Rare's split with Nintendo may have been due to professional/cultural rivalry with their Japanese heads.
Miyamoto certainly wasn't very fond of them.
And even if Nintendo had fully bought Rare instead of selling their stake to Microsoft, I doubt things would have worked out much differently for the studio.
At best, it would be a Retro Studios situation, with Nintendo keeping the company under their thumb, with no creative autonomy, never letting their projects get off the ground, but hiring enough talented rotating staff to make a good game occasionally.
It would still have been Rare in name only.
@mesome713 49% actually.
I was 16 when this launched, got it on day 1 and I think that I played almost a full day. I only have fond memories of the N64 and this game has been a total highlight of that era. I really found it to be Perfect in every aspect as you can see the love that has been put into the game. I don't really know if anything like that could happen again today. I mean, this was really something new, at least for me as I only played on Nintendo consoles.
I loved that you could play multiplayer against bots. Me and me friends used to create an expert maxed out Bot with Shigeru Miyamoto’s face and have great fun as he slaughtered us all!
There will never be a second Goldeneye or Perfect Dark that is as good as the original... but what about damn TimeSplitters?
I love perfect dark it’s a masterpiece but golden eye is more fun. If I play perfect dark today it feels very serious but golden eye is more laid back fun. I think what I’m saying is I have to be in the right mood for perfect dark where as golden eye I always have a good time.
I remember my brother owning this game. I believe the only Rare game he owned (he played other Rare games but never own them).
20 years
@Impaler-D Robin, Gregg, Louise, Marlowe, Machachek... they're all still at Rare. And that Rare legacy has clearly been passed down. Sea of Thieves is one of the best games of the generation
@mesome713 No. Donkey Kong and StarFox were always Nintendo brands. Rare-owned brands like Perfect Dark, Banjo etc... was sold along with the company.
@Dringo I wasn't aware anyone still played that game.
The last I heard, most people tried it, were quickly tired of the shallow gameplay/world and never looked back.
And if Rare's legacy was passed down, why was their post-Nintendo games so sub-par?
Microsoft meddling?
@mesome713 The agreement was Nintendo keep their IP ie Donkey Kong etc. Rare keep their IP. It was a straightforward sale.
@Beaucine Perfect Dark brought its own flavour to the table and it is up there with the best. I've been playing on real console recently, absolutely brilliant.
@Deanster101 you never played it. I was playing it recently on real hardware ultra hdmi modified and it was amazing and highly playable despite the framerate, infact I prepared myself for the worst and I didn't even find it an issue, even playing co op and 4 player multiplayer.
All old consoles feature awful additional lag on lcd as they are rubbish at converting and handling 240p games, however I think if you have atleast access to a line doubler prior to output that should help.
PD64 on my NTSC N64 with Super64 is a still an absolute blast. Seriously people the slick mode on the Super64 HDMI adapter is really impressive and IMO worth the money alone. I’m replaying a number of classic N64 and GC games and pretending it 90s early 00s again. Brilliant. Busting through Pilotwings64 atm - the perfect way to end the day
@liveswired I assure you I did play it and in fact still have my original copy. As I said it’s a great game but I can’t enjoy today on my n64 because of the crazy low frame rate. Well done for being able to afford an ultra hdmi mod I’m sure it’s great 😁.
A true masterpiece in every way possible! I have fond memories of summer 2000, we played ALOT, all the modes, singleplayer, co-op, challenges, against simulants, without simulants, this game had it all. 10/10
I played it again very recently, and really noticed the framerate being slow, but when i played it for a while i got used to it, then it felt like good old times again. I tried to beat some levels on perfect agent, failed on all of them lol, damn this game is brutal.
This game and Goldeneye are easily the best console shooters ever for me.
Absolutely loved the game back in the day. The Laptop gun, bots with all sorts of crazy personalities, the nighttime cityscape and creepy setting ...
Would love to go through this in the remaster if it ever came to Switch, though I found the Wii version of Goldeneye a pretty ideal update ... inspired by the original game, but a truly fresh/modern take on it.
Rare-replay on switch.
Outclassed...? Well...
I see why it would be seen as better, personally I love Goldeneye more.
I always preferred Goldeneye but Perfect Dark was a great FPS for it's era.
@Impaler-D Sea of Thieves just had its biggest ever month. I did a big interview with them in February and have done a lot of coverage on that game’s comeback. They did a number of major updates that has transformed the title and it’s perception amongst Xbox and PC gamers. Take a look at the recent coverage (anything in the last year), it staged a really big comeback and it’s fast becoming Rare’s biggest game. I just finished the story mode today and it’s proper great. It has a lot of that silly Rare humour. I’m an old school fan of the studio and this new game feels like a Rare game... although you need a friend or 3 to really enjoy it to the maximum.
Robin Beanland (Rare legend) did the soundtrack and Gregg Mayles is the architect of the game (he who led Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie). Their new game Everwild is also being led by Louise O’Connor (Conker’s Bad Fur Day). So although a lot of the legends have moved on, those that remain are still running things.
Rare’s post-Nintendo games weren’t sub-par, not overall. Ghoulies needed a co-op mode, but is actually great and made by the exact same team as Banjo (it’s a real hidden gem). Viva Piñata and its sequel (and the DS one) are among their best games. Nuts and Bolts isn’t what fans wanted, but is actually a thoroughly great game in its own right. Kinect Sports is fantastic, although again... not want fans wanted.
Kameo is ok. Perfect Dark Zero is bad. And Kinect Sports Rivals was below par. But they made disappointing games for Nintendo, too. Starfox Adventures, Mickey’s Speedway USA and Killer Instinct Gold, for instance.
It’s a myth that Rare got bad after they were sold. It’s just in the old days they could make 2 (sometimes 3) games a year. Some new IP and some sequels. Some games were classics and some were ‘ok’. Now AAA games take so much longer to make and require so many more people, you only get a couple of games a generation.
Great article. Really conveyed the feeling of a small team on a crazy project. Even at the time, the game felt over-ambitious, but there are worse things a game could be criticised for
Before I read the article I want to say; This game was a big part of my childhood. I still have a Nintendo 64 and a copy of the game. I got 3 stars on all the levels—even using Speed Running trick on WAR! That was such hard work that I couldn’t replicate yet on the XBLA version.
My favorite levels were the Skedar levels because of the architecture of their ship and home world. It’s felt so alien. I liked their reptile bodies too. I was a liiiiittle confused and disappointed when I found out the Skedar are actually little squid-snakes (how did they build their tech??) but it made me appreciate the little details of their bodies smoking after you shoot them.
Whoever was the level designer and artist for Skedar Ruins, Attack Ship and the Skedar multiplayer levels; you nailed the look, feel and atmosphere of those designs.
I’m glad Rare made Perfect Dark and Goldeneye. I’m glad a Rare exists/existed. Thank you for bringing me the game that defined my childhood.
I liked Perfect Dark but I preferred Goldeneye soooo much more.
I don't think it outclassed Goldeneye at all.
One of the best FPS ever. It's worth an entire playthrough dedicated to celebrating its 20th Anniversary.
@playstation_king It already was remastered... ten years ago... as an Xbox Live Arcade game.
@Dringo Insightful post, but I have to disagree with Killer Instinct Gold being a bad game. That was a great improvement over the prior Killer Instincts and I played it for many years. Sure it was no Street Fighter, but it was arguably the best traditional fighting game on the N64.
@NotoriousWhiz I mean... I did come to it a few years late, but boy did I dislike that game. I’d been spoiled by Tekken etc
@Arkay probably second in time played for me to WWF: No Mercy on the N64. loved the rerelease on the 360 until it red-ringed.. never owned another MS product since
@Dringo Interesting.
I may have to check out Sea Of Thieves soon.
As for their other games, Perfect Dark Zero and Kameo were disappointments, I never played Grabbed By The Ghoulies but I recall some people calling it one of the worst horror games ever made, and everything else being very poorly received by fans. (aside from some GBA games)
The quality of these games may be arguable but it's fair to say the studio never reached the same heights as with Nintendo during this era.
With games like Nuts and Bolts, Viva Piñata and the Kinect games, were these projects chosen by Rare or assigned by Microsoft?
@Impaler-D Ghoulies was short and needed something to extend it. But it is not only a good game, it’s not a horror game. It’s a comedy. Originally a GameCube game, too. If you get Rare Replay, check it out. If you see the reviews for Rare Replay, they all call that one out as the surprise package.
Kameo is ok. It’s entertaining enough and decent for a launch game.
I did a big piece on Rare a few years ago. They always get to choose what they make. Nuts and Bolts is a Gregg Mayles idea. Started as a BK remake and then changed drastically. Rare did Viva Piñata deliberately as a counter to all the brown shooters on 360. Did a million copies, which was sold enough for a sequel.
Kinect Sports is complex. Rare had been working on numerous games that kept getting cancelled, and their most likely project to come out was a Newton sports and dancing game (Newton was the codename for the 360’s Wii rival). Then Newton got cancelled, and the head of the studio at the time, a guy called Lee Shuneman, was really concerned that Rare didn’t have a title green lit. He was then shown Kinect and pivoted the whole studio to focus on that in an effort to make Rare relevant.
And it temporarily worked. Kinect Sports was Rare’s most successful game and gave them a new life. They probably stayed too long making Kinect games. But now they’re back making the sort of games they’re known for. Banjo started life as a pirate game, and DKC2 was a pirate themed game, too.
You’re right though. Rare’s run of form during the mid 1990s to 2000 was incredible. And it won’t be repeated, because they simply don’t make that many games anymore.
But SoT is fantastic. And Rare Replay, albeit a collection, was great. They’re working with Dlala on a Battletoads reboot and they’ve got another game in the works called Everwild. And let’s not forget, they worked with Nintendo on Banjo in Smash.
Rare is still a relevant studio today. I wish their games were on Switch
Very nice read, I have yet to finish it. But English isn't my native langage and I have trouble with an expression in the second page. They're talking about the cheese Easter eggs hidden in every level : “Brett called it a cheese tidy”
What is a cheese tidy? What does this expression mean?
@Agent069 The best guess I can give for you is a piece of cheese neatly placed in the levels.
I don't think it did outclass James Bond. It did some things better than GoldenEye 64 and some thing worse. Overall it was still a great fps, but I would still rather play GoldenEye 64 again and again.
@playstation_king
It has already been done.
I mean yeah it's fun and the Xbox version is the definitive experience of it. But the sophomore slump of zero killed the whole series. So basically perfect dark is just one game and one flop and done. Not much of a legacy
@damien33ad I never get this kind of attitude. There's people who rave about games like Fifa or COD being amazing, and buy the nw version every year. I personally don't like either one, but I "get" why other people love them. Same reason I "get" why Minecraft and Fortnite are still so popular, even though I have zero interest.
Perfect Dark corrected all the quirks and design flaws of Goldeneye, like how guards couldn't see you even if they were looking at you through a window or a railing.
Vastly, vastly improved the multiplayer mode and gave you dozens of new options. (freakin programmable AI bots)
It has an interesting story of corporate espionage and an alien coverup.
Every weapon has an alt function, with some really cool designs, like the brilliant Laptop Gun and the badass Super Dragon. The gunplay is equally satisfying, like 007.
Generally very good stage design for the campaign. Similar to 007 how it's always the same point A to point B, yet it's how you get there can often include many varying differences. Every level feels fresh and unique. You actually want to explore it, and return on higher difficulties to discover new objectives, unlike most modern FPS games.
You can play the entire campaign in co-op, which is a blast. You can even play it counter-op; Has the latter ever been done before or since?
Goldeneye was revolutionary for console FPS games, in terms of graphics, controls, music, design, etc.. Up until then, if you played shooters on a console, you were seen as crazy and sad.
Perfect Dark just evolved it even further and pushed the N64 to it's limit. So much that you can't even play the campaign without the expansion pak.
I could say more, but PD is, was, and always will be, a "perfected goldeneye" from a technical and feature standpoint, and a groundbreaking exercise in game design.
Fortunately for The Initiative, PD Zero is such a shameful embarrassment, their reimagining of the series cannot possibly be any worse, so I wish them the best of luck with it.
@damien33ad Don't get me wrong, Perfect Dark is still a great fps game imo, but I just think GoldenEye 64 is a more all round balanced game and is more satisfying and fun as a result. Perfect Dark does this typical thing of adding mooore and thinking that automatically equals better, but that's not always the case for me. And note, it's the single player games where I'm really focusing my judgement here because I think GoldenEye 64's single player campaign is the absolute best on N64, bar none. The multiplayer is great too, but I think there's an argument that Perfect Dark could be better there, although I never played enough of Perfect Dark's multiplayer to really say either way. But it's even stuff like the menu designs for example: I found GoldenEye 64's to be really intuitive and charming, whereas I always found Perfect Dark's menu to be rather convoluted and confusing to be honest. So yeah, I think Perfect Dark is very good, but I just think GoldenEye 64 is better.
@damien33ad All I did was show my own passion for these two classics, offered a way of looking at it you may not have considered, and you went right off the deep end. Holy crap.
@damien33ad Says the authoritarian language police. Your idea of what thought police are is laughable.
@damien33ad I prefere Pizza Nova, personally. 🍕
@damien33ad I see your green olives, and raise you a black olive. 😉
May 20th 2000 was the launch date.
Probably overall my favorite game as I still play it for fun, and I’ve been in love with it for 20 years. Looking forward to the new game. Never played the 360 one and I’ve heard it’s bad.
There is definitely a reason it’s the highest rated FPS.
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