1998, N64 Magazine: “It’s already at the top of our wish list, but we don’t expect to see a finished version of Perfect Dark until well into next year. Doesn’t time just crawl along when you really want it to fly?”
It wouldn’t been until 2000 that Perfect Dark was finally released but it left a huge impression, one that is still felt today.
Developed by Rare, Perfect Dark was the spiritual sequel to their 1997 preeminent first person shooter GoldenEye 007, which had advanced the FPS genre from the gory blasting of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D to the tactical stealth of James Bond. Perfect Dark took one more step down a similar path.
Like its predecessor, Perfect Dark featured celebrated multiplayer map design, a huge variety of weapons, immersive stealth and infiltration gameplay (including reload animations!), variable difficulty and made wild predictions about dual analogue controls by allowing you to play with two controllers simultaneously. Unlike its predecessor, Perfect Dark featured a grimy, futuristic world inspired by Blade Runner, an alien-rich sci-fi plot inspired by the X-Files, cooperative play, an expansive challenge mode, a raft of AI and multiplayer tuning options and bold, unbalanced weapons that let you orchestrate chaos with your friends. It starred Joanna Dark (named after Jeanne d’Arc, aka Joan of Arc), a female protagonist in a medium that still now rarely commits to anything less than a white male lead.
Booting up an N64 to play it now, Perfect Dark certainly shows its age. Now that dual analogue controls are the norm, it feels counterintuitive to look around with four directional buttons. The framerate is low and the environments lack detail. Overall, it’s a bit… janky, maybe even off-putting. But there is still a wealth of imagination here, from small, scripted NPC interactions dotted around the missions to the ‘PeaceSim’ type AI who runs around disarming players and hiding guns.
Wesley Yin-Poole interviewed a number of the developers from Rare in 2020 and filled out the story of a troubled development. Perfect Dark was envisioned as a successor to GoldenEye that would simply reuse the older game’s engine and take 12-18 months to finish but in the end, around half of that engine was re-written as Rare encouraged ambitious new additions. At first, the bosses at Rare gave the team time and space to do this. They were a small team afforded a lot of freedom without interference from the studio higher-ups: ideal conditions. But the reality was far less than ideal.
‘Crunch’ is the term for working incredibly long hours to get a game finished. Towards the end of work Perfect Dark, it was not uncommon for developers to be doing 100 hour weeks.
It produced amazing things. I think anyone who was at Rare in that period of time who is honest about it will say it did permanent damage to people. We didn’t realise it at the time. But you can’t do that.
Dr. David Doak, interview by Wesley Yin-Poole for Eurogamer
Crunch at Rare may have been particularly bad, but the rewards were particularly generous. Everyone interviewed by Wesley Yin-Poole had some way of justifying it to themselves and for some, they ended up being able to afford a house.
However, there was another difficult story behind Perfect Dark‘s development: the departure of lead designer Martin Hollis. Hollis’ four year contract came up for renewal in September 1998. He decided he didn’t want to commit to four more years and walked away from Perfect Dark. It was an acrimonious farewell for Hollis and the Rare bosses, and not unrelated to the pressure that everyone was under to give their absolute all to this new game. It cause a number of other key people to reconsider their positions. At the end of 1998, David Doak, Steve Ellis, Karl Hilton and Greame Norgate left Rare to form Free Radical Design. Game development has always told this story, of designers getting fed up working for bigger companies and going off to start their own independent studios. Free Radical Design went on to have huge success with the Timesplitters series. For Perfect Dark, five of its key creators (almost half the core team) had left quite suddenly, right in the middle of development.
Perfect Dark was, of course, eventually released. The departures had come at a time when most of the game was mapped out and ready for programming. More staff were hired or drafted in from other Rare teams, and crunch ramped up. The game does bear scars from its development strife – namely, the low framerate and the required use of the N64 RAM Expansion Pak – but ultimately, it remains regarded as an early pinnacle of the first person shooter and a precursor to many great games in that genre’s evolution.
Rare were bought by Microsoft in 2002, released a poorly received Perfect Dark prequel – Perfect Dark Zero – as a launch title for the Xbox 360 and in 2010 released a remaster of the original game.
One and a half years ago, a new Perfect Dark game was announced.
This gorgeous pre-rendered teaser was shared at The Game Awards in December 2020. In an dystopia ravaged by environmental disaster, corporations have stepped in as humanity’s saviours. Evidently, the corporations are not as benevolent as they seem and it is the player’s mission to uncover their secrets/thwart their evil plans. (The original game also cast a corporation, dataDyne, as the antagonist, responsible for fueling an interstellar war while conspiring against the US government and the Carrington Institute, to which Joanna “Perfect” Dark belongs.)
The new game has been in development at The Initiative, a company formed under Xbox Game Studios in 2018. Microsoft announced the studio at E3, revealing it would be lead by industry veteran Darrell Gallagher (previously head of Crystal Dynamics) and promising they were recruiting more “world class talent to create ground-breaking new experiences”. Over the next two years (as rumours grew that the studio was working on something to do with Perfect Dark), Microsoft continued to hype The Initiative as its “AAAA” studio and did, indeed, continue building an illustrious team, including:
Daniel Neuburger – game director (Tomb Raider game director)
Brian Westergaard – director of production (God of War producer)
Christine Thompson – narrative lead (Destiny 2 narrative dir.)
Drew Murray – design director (Sunset Overdrive lead designer)
Remi Lacoste – experiential director (Tomb Raider and Marvel’s Avengers director)
Christian Cantamessa – cinematics director (Red Dead Redemption lead designer)
Chris O’Neill – lead level designer (God of War level designer)
Ian Miller – senior designer (God of War level designer)
Kai Zheng – senior designer (God of War level designer)
Ray Yeomans – senior designer (God of War level designer)
Sean Slayback – lead systems designer (Titanfall , CoD and Apex Legends weapons designer)
Jason Priest – art lead (Spider-Man lead environment artist)
Lee Davis – lead animator (veteran Naughty Dog animator)
Tyler Thornock – principal technical animator (Uncharted 4 lead technical dir.)
That’s really the mandate: make something ground-breaking. Innovate. Take those brightest minds in the industry and beyond and say, “What can we do in the future?” We have all this hardware, all these tools, all the creativity. As a gamer, we have the opportunity play games across every device in every place. For me as a creator, it’s awesome to be given the opportunity by Phil Spencer and by Xbox to go build something.
Darren Gallagher, interview by Dean Takahashi for GamesBeat
It was all sounding pretty sweet, until this:
Xbox’s The Initiative studio has seen a “fast and furious” wave of senior departures in the past 12 months, VCG has learned. As much as half of the core development team known to be working on the upcoming Perfect Dark reboot quit the company during the last year, or around 36 people, analysis of employee LinkedIn profiles has revealed.
Andy Robinson reporting for Videogames Chronicle, March 2022
At the start of 2021, VCG listed 67 known employees at The Initative. 38 of those left over the course of last year. That includes Dan Neuburger, Christine Thompson, Drew Murray, Chris O’Neill, Ian Miller, Kai Zheng, Ray Yeomans, Sean Slayback and Lee Davis – 9 out of 14 people I listed above. That is one hell of an exodus.
The Initiative studio head Darrell Gallagher told VCG that the departures were normal, especially after the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic, while exiting staff pointed to “a lack of creative autonomy and slow development progress”. It seems that many were frustrated by Gallagher and Dan Neuburger’s autocratic creative control.
The two men had been colleagues at Crystal Dynamics, who in 2021 were brought in to assist The Initiative with Perfect Dark. Evidently, this endeavor wasn’t completely harmonious. The partnership was officially announced in September and it seems that Crystal Dynamics’ involvement now includes plugging the gaps left by the departing staff.
Since the publication of Andy Robinson’s article, Microsoft and The Initiative have been rather quiet about their apparent tribulations, except to confirm that Crystal Dynamics are still collaborating on Perfect Dark after their sale to Embracer Group was announced in May.
It all just seems a little sad. Thinking back to the Rare days, when the developers of the original Perfect Dark were worked to the bone in a far smaller and more familial company, half the development team left to strike out on their own and be rid of demanding bosses. A little over 20 years later, a number of industry big-hitters, frustrated by their own demanding bosses, have jumped ship on a shiny new sequel before it really got off the ground.
The circumstances are very different, of course. In the ’90s, Rare mainly consisted of young, single graduates. They lived and worked in a small English town. They were able to devote most of their life to make a ground-breaking game in a still-young medium. Now, the medium no longer feels young. The experienced developers who left The Initiative are well-positioned to get new jobs in a talent-hungry city at a time when gaming is booming and companies are hiring. The videogame world is far more expansive in 2022. It is perhaps this that allowed these developers to quit, rather than suffer poor working conditions. It remains to be seen how the new Perfect Dark will move forward, and we may never know more behind its turbulent early development. However, as this story speaks on the one hand to Microsoft’s ever-growing videogame empire, it perhaps also speaks to the ever-growing power of developers, who are able to walk away when they are not treated right.
As any Perfect Dark player knows, corporations can never be trusted.
Ben Jackson 