As part of their Rare Replay video series which shows new and exclusive content celebrating the release of Rare’s game compilation of the same title, Rare has just released Rare Revealed: The Making of Perfect Dark. The video gives a retrospective look at one of the most important console first person shooters of all time, Perfect Dark.
The video opens by giving insight on how Perfect Dark was able to come to fruition. Coming off the large success of Goldeneye 007 the team at Rare wanted to continue making games in the shooter genre. Talks were happening for Rare to possibly do a follow-up game for the next James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies but designer Ken Lobb (who had the Goldeneye gun “Klobb” named after him) mentions they were “dramatically outbid” by a third party for the rights. This allowed the Rare team to create a new IP that included ideas which wouldn’t fit in the James Bond universe – namely aliens and a female protagonist. Perfect Dark was later released in 2000 and was lauded by players and critics while Tomorrow Never Dies, developed by Electronic Arts, released in 1999 to a widely negative response.
Interviews given by key team members give a very candid look at the time the game was being created. Motion capture technology was still relatively new. Voice acting in video games had not been a popular practice up until that point so the staff decided to use one of the game’s composers, Eveline Novakovic, as the voice of Joanna Dark. Novakovic also appears in the video.
Perfect Dark was re-released alongside many other popular Rare titles on the compilation Rare Replay for Xbox One earlier in the summer. Another popular title on the compilation, Banjo-Kazooie, recently had a video released depicting its early stages as game called Dream.