How do you follow GoldenEye 007?
In the summer of 2000 – that's 20 years ago this month – Rare presented its answer: Perfect Dark, a sci-fi spy shooter centred around an alien conspiracy. It delivered a cool, competent heroine, a single-player campaign bursting with ambitious ideas, and the most comprehensive multiplayer experience on the Nintendo 64. To this day, it stands as Rare’s highest-rated game on Metacritic, achieving an average score of 97. So how did the team not only follow, but surpass GoldenEye 007? For Martin Hollis, the game’s director for the first half of development, the crucial decision was stepping away from Britain's most famous fictional secret agent.
“The first question was, ‘Did we want to do another Bond game?’ and Nintendo actually offered that option but that was very easily dispatched,” Hollis tells us. “I personally wasn’t interested in doing another game in that universe, we’d spent enough time – three years, essentially – in the Bond universe for my taste."
The first question was, ‘Did we want to do another Bond game?’ I personally wasn’t interested in doing another game in that universe, we’d spent enough time – three years, essentially – in the Bond universe for my taste
David Doak (yes, the scientist we all shot in Facility) adds: “We were pretty much Bonded-out. There’s only so much Soviet-era stuff you can endure. And at the time we were competing with things like Turok, and they all had carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with baddies and weapons and so on. If we made another Bond game, it’d be like the second album and people wouldn’t think we’ve really innovated.”
The team didn’t want to abandon everything it had accomplished with GoldenEye 007, of course. For most of them, the James Bond shooter was the first game they had ever made. They had developed a brand new engine, so it made sense to build upon that and create a new title in the same vein, with similar gameplay and the same “weapon centricity,” as Hollis put it.
From the very beginning, Perfect Dark was planned as a spiritual successor to GoldenEye, with the aim to have the game finished within just one year. In theory, the main effort would go into building new levels that ran on the previous game’s tech. But the team’s ambition expanded throughout the course of the project, and many of GoldenEye’s systems were improved and overhauled.
“Perfect Dark was like the semi-sequel to GoldenEye, and it’s always difficult making a sequel,” recalls Mark Edmonds, who led development by the end. “Can you make it better than the first one? That should be easy, but generally, it isn’t. So everyone was in the mindset of ‘What can we do to make this better than GoldenEye?’ There were a lot of ideas for new features and everyone had thoughts about what could have gone into that game but didn’t.”
Spy-fi
The team had been reading a lot of science fiction at the time, and posters from films such as Nikita graced the walls of their office. This inspired both the decision to make a sci-fi shooter, and one with a female protagonist. The team were keen to lean into the conspiracy theories that surrounded aliens, drawing inspiration from things like The X-Files, as well as other pillars of the genre such as Blade Runner.
But the game was to remain somewhat grounded. This was in part due to the near-future setting (the events of Perfect Dark are supposed to take place in 2023, just around the corner for us), but also stemmed from the GoldenEye tech running in the background. The James Bond game was built to be realistic and this could still be felt in Perfect Dark. That’s partly why the majority of guns still use bullets rather than lasers or other fantastical sci-fi tropes – with fairly obvious exceptions, such as the X-ray vision FarSight.
GoldenEye also partly drove the decision to make Perfect Dark a spy shooter. While the team was finished with Bond and his universe, the gameplay possibilities afforded by being a secret agent were too tempting to ignore. “By the time we got to the end of GoldenEye, we’d built up a feature set of non-combat gameplay, like the sneaking and stealth stuff,” says Doak. “And we realised there was a lot of potential there, but there wasn’t time to go back and do more of it in GoldenEye. At the start of GoldenEye, sneaking wasn’t really one of the core gameplay mechanics – apart from the fact you might set off alarms. It just became a gameplay mechanic as we started to flesh out the level and found that it worked.”
There was also a lot of admiration for 1998’s Metal Gear Solid, which clearly indicated there was an appetite for a more covert shooter. Duncan Botwood, who helped shape the multiplayer for both GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, reveals the team wanted to do more with gadgets, a desire that would eventually lead to the Data Uplink, plus the CamSpy and its variants.
Of course, the trouble then was if it wasn’t bloody perfect by the time we finished it, we’d really set ourselves up for a fall
“With GoldenEye, we used the gadgets in a very perfunctory way because we were building something very quickly,” he says. “It was very ‘throw something onto the object and that’s it, objective completed’. We wanted to explore what other stuff we could do that wasn’t gun-related and could help us do other things. We were trying to broaden out the player’s repertoire, let them express themselves in ways that weren’t just shooting.
“There are games that could do this but don’t often do so, and I think they’re less because of it – although I still enjoy them. Shooting itself is good when you get it right, and so many games get it right. But if it’s all you do, longevity becomes an issue, and I don’t think it’s very helpful to the player to only ever do that. As a player, I’d rather be doing other things.”
The original working title was Covert Ops, but this evolved over time into Alien Intelligence and eventually Perfect Dark. Brett Jones, who built and animated the majority of the character models and led motion-capture efforts, says this was reached through a highly scientific process: the team wrote down a lot of descriptive words, a lot of nouns, and stuck them on the back of the door in different combinations. They tried hundreds until they found one that felt right. “Of course, the trouble then was if it wasn’t bloody perfect by the time we finished it, we’d really set ourselves up for a fall,” laughs Jones.
Introducing Joanna Dark
With Bond out of the picture, the team set about creating a new spy icon. Determined to have a female lead (but also conscious that a certain Ms Croft was still the standout example of a video game heroine), Doak says there was a real drive to design someone that “wasn’t a 'tits and arse' character.”
It’s been said in the past that Joanna Dark was modelled on historical figure Joan of Arc, but Doak confesses that’s not entirely true. “I think that’s the thing that just sounds good. I can’t remember whether Joanna Dark or Perfect Dark came first. I think Joanna came first, but as I recall, the Joan of Arc thing was a kind of retro-fit. Joanna Dark sounded like a nice name, and then, ‘Ooh, it sounds a bit like Joan of Arc. That’s quite good.’ As opposed to it fitting the other way around.”
Defining Joanna Dark was Jones’ first task on the project. In an effort to get away from female heroines with sex appeal central to their design, he aimed for something more utilitarian. “We’d all been enjoying Ghost In The Shell and the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film – a lot of influence from those,” he says. “We were heavily influenced by early anime stuff. Even Joanna’s costume is almost directly ripped from Ghost In The Shell. Also, the leather outfit was inspired by Mrs Peel from The Avengers, and the dragon dress actually used the dragon design from Killer Instinct.
“For Joanna, we also got a female motion capture artist called Laurie Sage. She came in for one day and we did the majority of her stuff then. She was the proper size for Joanna Dark, quite short and petite, so we actually had a woman doing female motion capture, as opposed to Duncan Botwood prancing around [in high heels].” However, Joanna Dark was not modelled on Sage but on a far more famous face.
“She was completely based on Winona Ryder,” Jones admits. “I was collecting images of faces, had a massive collection of reference images and we just picked her. She had this great pixie haircut and fulfilled the look of what we wanted Joanna to look like.”
The game’s lead was not the only character modelled on a celebrity. Her boss Daniel Carrington was based on James Robinson Justice, known for movies ranging from The Guns of Navarone to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. NSA director and secondary villain Trent Easton was modelled on Titanic actor Billy Zane, while the mysterious Mr Blonde was based on Götz Otto, who played Tomorrow Never Dies henchman Mr Stamper. Finally, the president of the USA was modelled on Babylon 5 star Richard Biggs, who happens to be Jones’ friend.
There were more humble origins for other characters. The female bodyguards of main villain Cassandra De Vries were based on the promotional girls used in the game’s E3 announcement. Jones designed an appropriate costume for the show and later applied it to the game. Even the girls’ faces were used for the bodyguards. Jonathan, another Carrington Institute agent, was also sourced from E3: he was a man who gave Jones several Star Wars T-shirts as part of the team’s internal competition to see who could get the most merchandise from the show.
Designs on the future
The lengths Jones went to in designing original characters is indicative of one of the biggest challenges the Perfect Dark team faced: creating a new universe. Unshackled from the licence restrictions of the Bond licence and bolstered by the trust earned from Rare’s management, the crew had complete creative freedom.
“It was huge and intimidating,” says Hollis. “Creating a new universe takes a lot of work. There’s a lot of material and detail to fill in. Authors say this – you end up creating a lot of background material for your characters and it doesn’t actually make it into the final cut. There was so much we made up that isn’t really visible in the game. We didn’t want long and elaborate cutscenes because it’s really about the action.”
There was so much we made up that isn’t really visible in the game. We didn’t want long and elaborate cutscenes because it’s really about the action
Jonathan was a prime example; he was originally Jonathan Dark, Joanna’s brother. Similarly, Velvet Dark – the second player’s character in co-op, essentially Joanna with a blonde wig – was also supposed to be developed further as a character but, as with Jonathan, this was left on the cutting room floor.
Even the aliens weren’t as fully fleshed-out in the game as they were behind the scenes. Botwood had given the evil Skedar a deeper backstory to make them sympathetic, explaining that their planet was collapsing – hence its ruined appearance in the final mission. Meanwhile, alien ally Elvis originally had even more quirks. “Elvis went through so many iterations because originally he was much more of an Elvis fan,” Jones explains. “I had him in blue suede shoes, and he was an anglophile so I have drawings of him in Union Jack waistcoats. But we were getting into all sorts of copyright issues, so we had to tone it down a bit.”
Some team members recognise that, in hindsight, perhaps they had too much freedom. The game expanded far beyond its original scope, which made it harder to compress into an N64 cartridge (more on that later). Chris Tilston, who became lead designer by the end, notes that unlike games today, Perfect Dark “didn't have a producer telling people when to stop.”
“Rare management was pretty hands-off, as they could see the progress the team was making and Tim [Stamper, Rare's co-founder] was super supportive,” he says. “I'm sure behind the scenes he was doing everything he could to shield the team from any external pressures. Mark Edmonds was probably the gateway to stop too much chaos. He'd say, 'Maybe we should finish this bit first', but even he joined in by the end when he designed and programmed all of the multiplayer challenges after we had our six-month extension. It was a highly collaborative, ego-free environment and when someone came up with a good idea it was pretty readily incorporated, which was what made the development environment unique.”
Botwood agrees: “It was a fairly organic process from there, and it was fairly democratic as well. There wasn’t one person saying, ‘I’m the creative director, we’re going to do this and that.’ The team structure was comparatively flat – Martin was definitely in charge, but everybody else was very skilled and had their own ideas. Both the GoldenEye and the early Perfect Dark teams are two of the most collaborative I have ever worked with.”
Rare was an odd place to work in some ways, they always seemed to be slightly weird about credits
Edmonds explains that this is part of the reason there were no job titles in the end credits (or, indeed, in this very feature). Since everyone chipped in with multiple aspects of the game, regardless of their specialisation, it was unfair to label them by such limited means. There was also another factor, an ongoing quirk of the studio.
“Rare was an odd place to work in some ways, they always seemed to be slightly weird about credits,” Edmonds says. “Maybe because they were worried if people had their names in credits under certain titles, suddenly recruitment agents would try to contact that person and steal them for another company. I don’t know if that was the real reason. But most of the games didn’t have credits that specified what people did. I know that was a problem on GoldenEye. You can almost work out from the names what people did, though.”
Jones, for example, was credited as ‘Bodybuilder’ since he literally built all the characters and creatures, and handled their animation. Chris Darling, who designed many of the guns, was listed as ‘Weapons Specialist.’
This did lead to problems for one member of the team. Beau Ner Chesluk, who actually programmed the credits, had to provide official identification to Nintendo to verify his name was legitimate – his job title of ‘Guns and Visual Orgasms’ combined with his first two names sounding like ‘boner’ aroused suspicions back in Japan. More interestingly, Chesluk reveals that the first collection of names in the credits always appear in a random order. This was a team consensus; since everyone played an equal part in designing the game, random would be more fair than alphabetical.
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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