This inspired both the decision to make a sci-fi shooter, and one with a female protagonist. 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. 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 “Can you make it better than the first one? That should be easy, but generally, it isn’t. “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. But the team’s ambition expanded throughout the course of the project, and many of GoldenEye’s systems were improved and overhauled. In theory, the main effort would go into building new levels that ran on the previous game’s tech. 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.įrom 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. For most of them, the James Bond shooter was the first game they had ever made. The team didn’t want to abandon everything it had accomplished with GoldenEye 007, of course. If we made another Bond game, it’d be like the second album and people wouldn’t think we’ve really innovated.” 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. There’s only so much Soviet-era stuff you can endure. 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 tasteĭavid Doak (yes, the scientist we all shot in Facility) adds: “We were pretty much Bonded-out. “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?’ and Nintendo actually offered that option but that was very easily dispatched,” Hollis tells us. 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. To this day, it stands as Rare’s highest-rated game on Metacritic, achieving an average score of 97. It delivered a cool, competent heroine, a single-player campaign bursting with ambitious ideas, and the most comprehensive multiplayer experience on the Nintendo 64. 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.
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