Perfect Dark Was Supposed To Have Push Button Cheats, But They Accidentally Got Deleted

Dang it Beau. You had one job.

In computer science we always say use git. I learned the hard way overwriting homework. git wasn't a thing back then though. Version control sucked back then, so I can't blame them for not having it.

I feel cheated.

If I remember correctly it was also suppose to have a feature that involved the Gameboy camera taking a photo of yours or someone else's face and putting it on some of the enemy characters, however the news papers got wind of it and it was deleted too.
You see back then it was deemed wrong to do things like that, you could take a photo of a person you didn't like and you could kill them in the game.(All that violent games make violent behaviour in real life BS)
Shame!!

@Splatmaster that is a shame. The media (and grown ups) ruins everything, it seems.

To get around the outrage they could have enabled it only in paintball mode and maybe not have them die but faint or something. But I guess that would have been too much work at short notice and they were already tight in space.

Edit: Just imagine a game doing it nowadays. You’d have loads of Donald Trumps and Kim Jong Un’s running around along with people having boobs for faces.

I'm confused. There are cheat codes in PD...

Good job half the cheats were modes in the simulant arena then .
Fairly sure there was something "unlockable", perhaps not a typed code tho. I'd have to dig out my 64.
The only specific thing I remember not carrying over was in Golden eye you could reload a dual weapon and get the next weapon along when you timed it, so an AK and grenade launcher combo was possible. Had fun tinkering with that one.

Edit: yeah PD has a cheat menu from the awards you get playing through. It doesn't have the ones you can type in from the controller like in Goldeneye. Rare ly used those to be honest.

You could also gain 4 cheats if you had a copy of the Gameboy Color game and inserted it into the transfer pack on the controller (the divide came with Pokemon Stadium).

@HobbitGamer

I was confused too. I think when the article refers to "cheats", they are supposed to be distinct from the "rewards" you earn by beating levels fast enough. It slipped my mind, but it turns out Goldeneye had inputs you could perform to unlock a variety of cheats.

Maybe for the best. It would ruin the challenge of unlocking them through in game accomplishments.

@splatmaster @kienda
According to the other Perfect Dark article on this site today, it was Nintendo that but the kibosh on that particular feature. Probably because they could see how open to abuse it was and didn't want to give the likes of shouty tabloid newspapers any ammunition to bash their reputation as being family friendly.

@DevlinMandrake In think there might have also been a glitch with the face mapping feature that couldn't be solved.

Give yourself an uppercut Beau.

I’ve never heard that Perfect Dark is supposed to be a spiritual successor to Goldeneye 007

@DrDaisy
That's entirely believable. It's a lot to ask a consumer console CPU/GPU from the 90's to render 3D models from grainy, low-rez input.

I doubt Perfect Dark being 4MB.
I remember booting it from my Dr V64, and is was 256 mbit. So around 32MB.

Since you could earn cheats anyway it's not that much of an issue. Once you complete the game cheats were great for playing around with, games don't seem to do this lately.

@Aurumonado Haha! Dang it Beau, you had many many many jobs

@edhe Gotchya. I forgot GoldenEye had input cheats, as well.

@Splatmaster Actually Rare decided to pull the plug due to a mass high school shooting.

The Perfect Head feature was widely advertised before game launch with in depth previews in official Nintendo publications due to the use of Gameboy camera and transfer pak.

Apparently the Media ruined the camera feature with their treacherous reporting of facts to the public? If only Rare had had any say in the matter, but, alas, videogame companies are at the Media's every beckon call. For example, it's a well known fact that all the media coverage stopped Mortal Kombat's penchant for extreme violence after the first game released, and that's why it is now a series about playing checkers with your aunt!

...Or, you know, Rare made the decision themselves?

Anyway, I played about 10,000 hours of GoldenEye back in '97, and I never knew it had button cheats. Wild!

Some of GoldenEye's cheats were exclusive to button input codes.
Extra multiplayer characters, invisible multiplayer, and line mode!
You couldn't get them any other way. You had to input the code!
If Perfect Dark had similar codes, then some cool hidden bonuses were probably stripped away.

I think you unlocked the cheats automatically if you had a transfer pak and the GBC game right?

@Splatmaster There were a lot of projects like that back then. I remember Mission Impossible was hyped up by Nintendo Power to feature camera use for masks and eventual 64DD support for extra stages (like Ocarina of Time was supposed to have) with periodic releases. The game we actually got was a huge letdown in the case of Mission Impossible were they couldnt even get the controls down.

You accidentally ruined it man!

@Kienda Just keep mind that this would have been released in the wake of the Columbine Massacre, literally in the same year.

People were desperately looking for something (ANYTHING) outside their immediate understanding to scapegoat. One of the kid made levels in "Doom" -he used stock game assets, and the news media had a field day playing it up like he'd created this massive demonic vision of blood and gore. He'd tinkered with a rudimentary level editor, as thousands of other people had, nothing more. Rare was partnered with, and effectively owned by Nintendo at that time. Can you imagine the financial hurt that would have come down on their heads if, mere months after the school shooting that everyone was still talking about and trying to understand, there were headlines about "a NEW game with SUPERAMAZING3DGRAPHICS let you take pictures of your classmates with a Gameboy camera, and then shoot them up in a 3D gun simulation"? Heads would have rolled, all of them.

And as much as I am frequently disgusted with the media's over eagerness to help people blindly point the finger at others with little or no actual evidence... There's more to it than that. The country was feeling from these previously unheard of events. They were feeling for a good 6-12 months afterward. Media aside, it would have been in poor taste to debut such a feature into mainstream console games at that time. Stores would have inevitably banned it due to legions of angry parents (who can't be arsed to read the "M" rating on games they buy for their young children), and the game would have faded into obscurity, along with any chance of real profits from it's development. It's not like online ordering was a big thing back then, so if a game got pulled from major chain shelves that was basically it. Hell, eBay was still a foreign concept to many Americans, so they wouldn't have driven major sales outside of brick and mortar.

Given the choice to cut the content, or keep it and likely be blacklisted... They made the right call.

@Thehandsomedan yeah, I agree they made the right call on that one but it is still a shame than an outrage mob can limit creative freedom.

We see it happening all the time in many fields and whilst the occasion you mention sounds like a wise decision to change, a lot of the time the decisions aren’t made out of wisdom by out of fear of repercussions and sometimes detrimental. There are many time’s where the fan base is screwed over by the outrage of those who have no interest to support to the game.

@Kienda I agree, it's a shame we never got to see the feature fully realized on the platform. As far as I can recall, we didn't see a feature of that nature pop back up until it was included in some of the 3DS pre-installed "tech demo" games like Face Raiders. Even then, nothing like a traditional FPS game. Obviously, there have been big modding communities around a lot of titles, but I don't really count that because it's not used by the majority of mainstream players.